David Hockney, RIP: See the Evolution of His Pop-Art Swimming-Pool Masterpiece A Bigger Splash (1967)

in Art, History | June 15th, 2026

In a way, it always made sense that one of the most mem­o­rable visu­al dis­til­la­tions of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia life would have been paint­ed by an Eng­lish­man. The purest appre­ci­a­tion for the wide-open lifestyle choic­es, freestyle built envi­ron­ment, unre­pen­tant pri­vate wealth, and high-wattage sun­shine of Los Ange­les — espe­cial­ly as it was exag­ger­at­ed, and indeed mythol­o­gized, in mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pop­u­lar cul­ture — could only be felt by some­one from an infi­nite­ly more tra­di­tion­al, strait­ened, and damp part of the world. David Hock­ney, who died last week, was­n’t just an Eng­lish­man but a north­ern Eng­lish­man, who would have grown up sur­round­ed by the kind of atti­tudes sat­i­rized in the “Four York­shire­men” sketch made famous by Mon­ty Python. Lit­tle won­der he fell in love with the newest city of the New World.

Hock­ney gave that many artis­tic forms over decades of his long life and career. Prac­ti­cal­ly any­one who knows his name can rec­og­nize A Big­ger Splash, from 1967, a both idyl­lic and faint­ly eerie depic­tion of some­one hav­ing just plunged into the swim­ming pool behind what now looks like a clas­sic “mid­cen­tu­ry mod­ern” home accent­ed with palm trees.

But few­er can call to mind the works from which it evolved, A Lit­tle Splash and The Splash, both of which Hock­ney paint­ed the pre­vi­ous year; all togeth­er, they con­sti­tute a series orig­i­nal­ly inspired by a pho­to­graph on the cov­er of a swim­ming-pool main­te­nance guide from the late fifties. You can see the three paint­ings put in con­text in the Sothe­by’s video at the top of the post, which reveals how Hock­ney’s image grew more abstract­ed, and more Los Ange­lized, with each iter­a­tion.

When it came time to paint the third ver­sion, Hock­ney first built up its arrange­ment of house, pool, div­ing board, and sky with blocks of flat (if char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly bright) col­or. He then grad­u­al­ly nudged these shapes toward rep­re­sen­ta­tion by adding detail. Dis­cussing the mak­ing of the paint­ing lat­er in life, he liked to men­tion how much time he spent on the splash alone: a full week, at least, to ren­der an event that lasts no longer than a sec­ond or two. There would be more Hock­ney swim­ming pools, each evoca­tive in its own way, none more expen­sive than the near­ly pho­to­re­al­is­tic Por­trait of an Artist (Pool with Two Fig­ures), from 1971, which went for $90.3 mil­lion at Christie’s in 2018. But it was only A Big­ger Splash that went on to adorn the cov­er of Reyn­er Ban­ham’s Los Ange­les: The Archi­tec­ture of Four Ecolo­gies, still one of the most per­cep­tive books about that city — and one writ­ten, nat­u­ral­ly, by anoth­er besot­ted Brit.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Hock­ney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page

Watch David Hock­ney Paint with Light, Using the Quan­tel Paint­box Graph­ics Sys­tem (1986)

29 Sketch­books by Renowned Artist Richard Diebenko­rn, Con­tain­ing 1,045 Draw­ings, Now Freely View­able Online

How West Mag­a­zine Cre­at­ed a South­ern-Cal­i­for­nia Pop-Cul­ture Aes­thet­ic with the Help of Mil­ton Glaser, Gahan Wil­son, and Oth­ers (1967–1972)

Art Trips: Vis­it the Art of Cities Around the World, from Los Ange­les & Lon­don, to Venice and New York

When Hen­ri Matisse Was 83 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swim­ming Pool, So He Cre­at­ed a Swim­ming Pool as a Work of Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

in Books, Design | June 15th, 2026

In 1929, the book pub­lish­er George Macy found­ed The Lim­it­ed Edi­tions Club (LEC), an imprint tasked with pub­lish­ing fine­ly illus­trat­ed lim­it­ed edi­tions of clas­sic books. In the years to come, Macy worked with artists like Matisse and Picas­so, and pho­tog­ra­phers like Edward West­on, to pro­duce books with artis­tic illus­tra­tions on their inner pages. And some­times The Lim­it­ed Edi­tions Club even turned its design focus to oth­er parts of the book. Take for exam­ple this 1946 edi­tion of Edward Gib­bon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and its pret­ty amaz­ing spine design.

Cre­at­ed by Clarence P. Hor­nung, the design cap­tures the essence of Gib­bon’s clas­sic, show­ing Roman pil­lars pro­gres­sive­ly crum­bling as your eyes move from Vol­ume 1 to Vol­ume 7. George Macy lat­er called the col­lec­tion, which also fea­tures illus­tra­tions by the great 18th-cen­tu­ry print­mak­er Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Pirane­si, “the most her­culean labor of our career.”

Find more infor­ma­tion about this 1946 edi­tion here. Or, if you have deep pock­ets, pur­chase a copy here.

Note: an ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in June 2015.

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:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

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When Roald Dahl Wrote a Story Predicting the Rise of ChatGPT and Other AI Large Language Models (1954)

in Literature, Technology | June 12th, 2026

Most of us who know the work of Roald Dahl grew up with it, even­tu­al­ly com­ing to con­sid­er the man a mas­ter of imag­i­na­tive, often grotesque tales for chil­dren. A bit lat­er on, when we heard that he’d also writ­ten books for adults, with titles like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch, some of us sought them out as a kind of for­bid­den lit­er­ary fruit. What tends to escape notice is that he also wrote for teenagers — or, in any case, that cer­tain of his sto­ries were pack­aged for teenagers into the posthu­mous vol­ume The Great Auto­mat­ic Gramma­ti­za­tor, whose title sto­ry has gained a new rel­e­vance in our age of Chat­G­PT, as explained in the new Tibees video above.

First pub­lished in 1954, “The Great Auto­mat­ic Gramma­ti­za­tor” con­cerns an enor­mous­ly com­plex, whol­ly ana­log machine that can gen­er­ate page after page of text at a then-unimag­in­able clip. Its inven­tor, a beat­en-down young cor­po­rate employ­ee called Adolph Knipe, designs it based on the same prin­ci­ples he’d used to cre­ate an elec­tric cal­cu­la­tor that pleased his boss, Mr. Bohlen. A frus­trat­ed writer of fic­tion by night, Knipe con­ceives of the Gramma­ti­za­tor as a tool of revenge against the mag­a­zine indus­try that spurned him. With the com­pa­ny’s back­ing to build the thing, he tells Bohlen, they could dom­i­nate the mar­ket for short sto­ries almost with­out effort — and make their own pres­ti­gious names as authors to boot.

“It stands to rea­son that an engine built along the lines of the elec­tric com­put­er could be adjust­ed to arrange words (instead of num­bers) in their right order accord­ing to the rules of gram­mar,” Dahl writes. “Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjec­tives, the pro­nouns, store them in the mem­o­ry sec­tion as a vocab­u­lary, and arrange for them to be extract­ed as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sen­tences.” Though Bohlen accepts the tech­ni­cal propo­si­tion, he at first doubts the com­mer­cial one, at least until his employ­ee informs him that mag­a­zines like the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Jour­nal will pay for a sto­ry “any­thing up to twen­ty-five hun­dred dol­lars”: near­ly $40,000 today.

Of course, 1954 was a dif­fer­ent time. Today, the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Collier’s, and Ladies’ Home Jour­nal have all gone, as has the prospect of earn­ing even a mea­ger liv­ing through short sto­ries. And a com­put­er of this kind, as Dahl describes it, would have been an enor­mous, noisy device laden with but­tons, dials, ped­als, and stops, each of which the “writer” would use to con­trol such vari­ables as theme, style, ten­sion, humor, and pas­sion. “The qual­i­ty may be infe­ri­or,” an increas­ing­ly pow­er-mad Knipe admits of the machine’s out­put, “but that doesn’t mat­ter. It’s the cost of pro­duc­tion that counts.” All of us now pos­sess Gramma­ti­za­tors of our own, far faster, cheap­er, more ver­sa­tile, and eas­i­er to use than any­thing Roald Dahl could have imag­ined. Yet how many of us can hope to be read more than 70 years in the future?

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

How George Orwell Pre­dict­ed the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nine­teen Eighty-Four (1949)

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dict­ed the Rise of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & the Exis­ten­tial Ques­tions We Would Need to Answer (1978)

Roald Dahl Gives a Tour of the Small Back­yard Hut Where He Wrote All of His Beloved Children’s Books

Read a Nev­er Pub­lished, “Sub­ver­sive” Chap­ter from Roald Dahl’s Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry

Roald Dahl, Who Lost His Daugh­ter to Measles, Writes a Heart­break­ing Let­ter about Vac­ci­na­tions: “It Is Almost a Crime to Allow Your Child to Go Unim­mu­nised”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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How the Hagia Sophia Was Built, and How It’s Being Saved from Collapse

in Architecture, History | June 11th, 2026

Ask around for what every­one knows about Istan­bul (oth­er than that it used to be called Con­stan­tino­ple), and you’ll find that the pres­ence of Hagia Sophia there comes right to many a mind. Less like­ly to be men­tioned is its prone­ness to earth­quakes, though it tends to rank just below Tokyo on lists of cities under the great­est threat from fault lines below. These two char­ac­ter­is­tics turn out to have a con­nec­tion, man­i­fest in the ongo­ing seis­mic retro­fitting of Istan­bul’s sym­bol­ic cathe­dral-turned-mosque-turned-muse­um turned-mosque-again. Hagia Sophia is one of the most cel­e­brat­ed reli­gious build­ings stand­ing; keep­ing it that way requires a seri­ous engi­neer­ing effort, as explained in the new B1M video above.

Since it was first built in the fourth cen­tu­ry, Hagia Sophia has actu­al­ly sus­tained severe earth­quake dam­age quite a few times, includ­ing a com­plete col­lapse of its cupo­la in the year 558 and par­tial col­laps­es in the tenth and four­teenth cen­turies. The con­struc­tion of its famous cen­tral dome, along with the small­er sub-domes that sup­port it, gets a sec­tion of its own in the video.

Host Fred Mills also gives due men­tion to the eight green mar­ble columns that sup­port the upper floors of the cathe­dral, thought to have been recy­cled from the ruins of the Tem­ple of Artemis (one of the Sev­en Won­ders of the Ancient World), and the red stone set into the floor on which emper­ors were once crowned that would have been brought in from the Egypt­ian desert.

In these and oth­er respects, Hagia Sophia isn’t just a site of pil­grim­age and wor­ship, but also a ver­i­ta­ble built record of cen­turies upon cen­turies of Roman, Greek, Chris­t­ian, and Islam­ic civ­i­liza­tion. As evi­denced by the scaf­fold­ing cur­rent­ly up to facil­i­tate the project of ready­ing it for the inevitable com­ing of the big one — or rather, the big­ger one — the struc­ture con­tin­ues to change with time, though our era has an espe­cial­ly strong con­cern for pre­serv­ing what have by now become his­tor­i­cal fea­tures. Hence the efforts now being put into restora­tion: of the dome, nat­u­ral­ly, but also of the floors, columns, and mosaics. If all goes well, Hagia Sophia will con­tin­ue to stand as the most strik­ing struc­ture in Istan­bul’s already dra­mat­ic urban and geo­graph­i­cal set­ting for anoth­er mil­len­ni­um and a half, incor­po­rat­ing his­to­ry all the while.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Muse­um, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

How the Byzan­tine Empire Rose, Fell, and Cre­at­ed the Glo­ri­ous Hagia Sophia: A His­to­ry in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

A Cul­tur­al Tour of Istan­bul, Where the Art and His­to­ry of Three Great Empires Come Togeth­er

360 Degree Vir­tu­al Tours of the Hagia Sophia

Hear the Hagia Sophia’s Awe-Inspir­ing Acoustics Get Recre­at­ed with Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tions, and Let Your­self Get Trans­port­ed Back to the Mid­dle Ages

Istan­bul Cap­tured in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Top­ka­ki Palace’s Impe­r­i­al Gate & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs

in Music | June 11th, 2026

Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Dig­ging deep into the crates will yield many an over­looked sur­prise, many a sub­tle sleep­er, cut-up clas­sic, and elec­tron­ic exper­i­ment. But if all you’ve got is Changes­bowie—the 1990 com­pi­la­tion that became, for some gen­er­a­tions, a defin­i­tive state­ment of his career—you’ve still got a col­lec­tion of songs the likes of which have nev­er been heard before or since in mod­ern pop.

Com­pletists may grouch, but even res­i­dent Bowie scholars/local record store clerks have an “Ash­es to Ash­es,” “’Heroes’,” “Changes,” or “Mod­ern Love” in their top ten. Whether ardent or casu­al fans, we con­nect with Bowie’s music through mile­stones, both in his career and in our own lives. This truth has been exploit­ed. In 2008, Mike Schiller at Pop­Mat­ters bemoaned the fact that almost 20 Bowie com­pi­la­tion albums had been released, a few of which “don’t real­ly seem to court any greater pur­pose what­so­ev­er.”

Giv­en this sur­feit of Bowie com­pi­la­tions on the mar­ket, Schiller’s ini­tial groan­ing reac­tion to news of yet anoth­er (“Oh, good Lord. Anoth­er David Bowie col­lec­tion?”) seems appo­site. Except this col­lec­tion, iSE­LECT: BOWIE, released in 2008 to read­ers of the U.K.’s Mail on Sun­day, then lat­er in an offi­cial CD and dig­i­tal edi­tion, “is actu­al­ly some­thing spe­cial.” Bowie “picked the track­list him­self. Even more than that, the track­list actu­al­ly looks like some­thing he’d have picked him­self, rather than hav­ing a man­ag­er or pub­li­cist pick it for him.”

iSE­LECT: BOWIE
1. “Life On Mars?” (from the album Hunky Dory)
2. “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing” (from the album Dia­mond Dogs)
3. “The Bewlay Broth­ers” (from the album Hunky Dory)
4. “Lady Grin­ning Soul” (from the album Aladdin Sane)
5. “Win” (from the album Young Amer­i­cans)
6. “Some Are” (cur­rent­ly exclu­sive to this com­pi­la­tion)
7. “Teenage Wildlife” (from the album Scary Mon­sters)
8. “Rep­e­ti­tion” (from the album Lodger)
9. “Fan­tas­tic Voy­age” (from the album Lodger)
10. “Lov­ing The Alien” (from the album Tonight)
11. “Time Will Crawl (MM Remix)” (new remix by David Bowie)
12. “Hang On To Your­self [live]” (from the album Live San­ta Mon­i­ca ’72)

See the full track­list above and hear a playlist of his picks at the top. If we put all our lists of favorites togeth­er, we might see a very high per­cent­age of “Life on Mars?” picks. We’re in excel­lent com­pa­ny; it’s Bowie’s num­ber one favorite song of his. But how many of his oth­er picks might we choose? The eight-and-a-half minute “Sweet Thing”/”Candidate”/”Sweet Thing (Reprise)” from Dia­mond Dogs? “Win” from Young Amer­i­cans or “The Bewlay Broth­ers” from Hunky Dory?

Aside from “Life on Mars?” and the far less­er-col­lect­ed “Lov­ing the Alien” and “Time Will Crawl,” none of his twelve selec­tions were released as sin­gles. There are no songs from two of the most acclaimed Bowie albums, Low and ’Heroes’, unless we count “Some Are” a bonus track includ­ed on the Low 1991 rere­lease. There are two tracks from Lodger, the third and least acces­si­ble of his vaunt­ed Berlin tril­o­gy, and only one selec­tion from Zig­gy Star­dust, and it ain’t “Zig­gy Star­dust.”

If any­one else hand­ed you this list of favorite Bowie tracks, you’d be skep­ti­cal. Who puts “Hang On To Your­self” (Live San­ta Mon­i­ca ’72) above any of the stu­dio tracks on that clas­sic 1972 break­out album? David Bowie, that’s who. And who knows, if you’d asked him the day before or after, he might have picked twelve dif­fer­ent songs. There’s no telling how seri­ous­ly he took the exer­cise, but in the news­pa­per release, he did “casu­al­ly [pen] his inspi­ra­tions for the songs and the record­ing process­es behind them,” notes Allmusic’s Jason Lyman­grover.

On his choice of “Teenage Wildlife,” for exam­ple, Bowie com­ment­ed: “So it’s late morn­ing and I’m think­ing, ‘New song and a fresh approach. I know. I’m going to do a Ron­nie Spec­tor. Oh yes I am. Ersatz just for one day.’ And I did and here it is. Bless. I’m still very enam­oured of this song and would give you two ‘Mod­ern Love’s for it any­time…” Bowie got to expe­ri­ence his own music in a way no one else could. iSE­LECT: BOWIE gets behind the great­est hits col­lec­tions for a glimpse at the way he heard and remem­bered his cat­a­logue.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s 100 Must Read Books

The Art Col­lec­tion of David Bowie: An Intro­duc­tion

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

David Bowie Sings Impres­sions of Bruce Spring­steen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits & More In Stu­dio Out­takes (1985)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Harvard’s 1869 Entrance Exam: Could You Answer Tough Questions About Latin, Greek, Ancient History, Plane Geometry & More

in Education, Harvard, History | June 10th, 2026

In 2025, Har­vard once again began ask­ing appli­cants to sub­mit an SAT or ACT score. This was a rever­sal of the no-test-nec­es­sary pol­i­cy that it and quite a few oth­er Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties adopt­ed dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. To some observers of high­er edu­ca­tion, the dis­ap­pear­ance of the stan­dard­ized-test require­ment came as a shock, though in a sense, it was­n’t with­out prece­dent. Until the mid-nine­teen-tens, Har­vard had appli­cants take its own entrance exam, since no stan­dard­ized test exist­ed. One exam­ple from 1869, which you can see here, eval­u­at­ed stu­dents on their pro­fi­cien­cy in Latin, Greek, his­to­ry and geog­ra­phy, arith­metic, alge­bra, and plane geom­e­try.

The idea was­n’t so much to eval­u­ate the test-tak­er’s rea­son­ing abil­i­ties as to make sure he’d already under­gone the expect­ed edu­ca­tion for his class. Even so, as the New York Times’ Ali­son Leigh Cow­an notes, “col­leges occa­sion­al­ly allowed prospects to cor­rect defi­cien­cies as a con­di­tion of admis­sion.”

This reflects the very dif­fer­ent role high­er edu­ca­tion played in Amer­i­can life a cen­tu­ry and a half ago than it does today: back then, Har­vard admit­ted 185 out of 210 appli­cants; last year, it admit­ted 1,968 out of 57,435. As the coun­try indus­tri­al­ized, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties changed accord­ing­ly: exist­ing ones grew, many new ones appeared, and a greater and greater per­cent­age of stu­dents sub­mit­ted to a process sur­round­ing ter­tiary edu­ca­tion that even­tu­al­ly came to seem machine-like itself.

To col­lege-apply­ing stu­dents today, the 1869 entrance exam may not look entire­ly unfa­mil­iar, at least to the extent that it asks ques­tions about math­e­mat­ics. Chances are, how­ev­er, that no cur­rent Har­vard hope­ful, no mat­ter how intel­li­gent, could actu­al­ly pass the test, giv­en the weight it places on clas­si­cal lan­guages. Through­out the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and up until World War I, all young gen­tle­men got an edu­ca­tion in Latin and ancient Greek. But when both start­ed to van­ish from col­lege-admis­sions exams, espe­cial­ly after the SAT grew dom­i­nant in the nine­teen-for­ties, so did the imme­di­ate incen­tive to learn them. Reflect though that does the exi­gen­cies of a rapid­ly chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal soci­ety, it also makes one won­der how much some­one with no grasp of Latin or Greek real­ly under­stands Eng­lish: a ques­tion to which the col­lege stu­dents of recent decades pro­vide dispir­it­ing answers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Cours­es: Explore Cours­es on Jus­tice, Amer­i­can Gov­ern­ment, Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­gion, Comp­Sci & More

This Is What an 1869 MIT Entrance Exam Looks Like: Could You Have Passed the Test?

Can You Pass This Test Orig­i­nal­ly Giv­en to 8th Graders Liv­ing in Ken­tucky in 1912?

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Syl­labus Asked Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Lit­er­ary Works, Total­ing 6,000 Pages

Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s Col­lege Admis­sion Essay on Shake­speare “Quite Incom­pre­hen­si­ble” (1951)

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

in Creativity, Film, Literature | June 10th, 2026

As we’ve not­ed before, the Eng­lish cof­fee­house has served as a stag­ing ground for rad­i­cal, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ary social change. Cer­tain­ly this was the case dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry it seems, cof­fee shops in Lon­don had grown scarcer and more hum­drum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Ital­ian espres­so bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momen­tous event”:

London’s first prop­er cof­fee shop—one equipped with a Gag­gia cof­fee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gath­er, and it is said by some that the intro­duc­tion of this cof­fee bar prompt­ed the youth cul­ture explo­sion that soon changed social life in Britain for­ev­er.

“By 1972,” Watts writes, “cof­fee bars were every­where and the teenage rev­o­lu­tion was firm­ly estab­lished.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ide­al place for coun­ter­cul­tur­al maven William S. Bur­roughs—a Lon­don res­i­dent from the late six­ties to ear­ly seventies—to hob­nob with young dis­si­dents and out­siders. Bur­roughs, who so approv­ing­ly refers to the pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal anar­chist pirate colony of Lib­er­ta­tia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appre­ci­ate the bud­ding anar­chism of British youth cul­ture, which would flower into punk soon enough.

But rather than join­ing the cof­fee bar scene, the can­tan­ker­ous Bur­roughs had tak­en to fre­quent­ing “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to men­tion the ‘Dil­ly Boys,’ young male pros­ti­tutes who hus­tled for clients out­side the Regent Palace Hotel.”

And he had grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned with Lon­don, fum­ing, writes Ted Mor­gan in Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­phy Lit­er­ary Out­law, “at what he was pay­ing for his hole-in-the-wall apart­ment with a clos­et for a kitchen” and at the ris­ing price of util­i­ties. “Bur­roughs,” Mor­gan tells us, “began to feel that he was in ene­my ter­ri­to­ry.” And he thought the Moka cof­fee bar should pay the price for his indig­ni­ties.

There, “on sev­er­al occa­sions a snarling coun­ter­man had treat­ed him with out­ra­geous and unpro­voked dis­cour­tesy, and served him poi­so­nous cheese­cake that made him sick.” Bur­roughs “decid­ed to retal­i­ate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d ear­li­er employed against the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy, “turn­ing up… every day,” writes Watts, “tak­ing pho­tographs and mak­ing sound record­ings.” Then he would play them back a day or so lat­er on the street out­side the Moka. “The idea,” writes Mor­gan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had tak­en place two days ago and you super­im­posed it on what was hap­pen­ing now, which pulled them out of their time posi­tion.”

Bur­roughs also con­nect­ed the method to the Water­gate record­ings, the Gar­den of Eden, and the the­o­ries of Alfred Korzyb­s­ki. The trig­ger for the mag­i­cal oper­a­tion was, in his words, “play­back.” In a very strange essay called “Feed­back from Water­gate to the Gar­den of Eden,” from his col­lec­tion Elec­tron­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, Bur­roughs described his oper­a­tion in detail, a dis­rup­tion, he wrote, of a “con­trol sys­tem.”

Now to apply the 3 tape recorder anal­o­gy to this sim­ple oper­a­tion. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is in pris­tine con­di­tion. Tape recorder 2 is my record­ings of the Moka Bar vicin­i­ty. These record­ings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Gar­den of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a record­ing made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The record­ing once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their con­trol. Tape recorder 3 is play­back. Adam expe­ri­ences shame when his dis­c­grace­ful behav­ior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By play­ing back my record­ings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the record­ings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They can­not affect me.

The the­o­ry made per­fect sense to Bur­roughs, who believed in a Mag­i­cal Uni­verse ruled by occult forces and who exper­i­ment­ed heav­i­ly with Sci­en­tol­ogy, Crow­ley-an Mag­ick, and the orgone ener­gy of Wil­helm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Bur­roughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On Octo­ber 30th, 1972  the estab­lish­ment closed its doors—perhaps a con­se­quence of those ris­ing rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the loca­tion became the Queens Snack Bar.

The audio-visu­al cut-up tech­nique Bur­roughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Bur­roughs and Brion Gysin from their exper­i­ments with writ­ten “cut-ups,” and Bur­roughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an inter­pre­tive “med­i­ta­tion” based on Bur­roughs’ use of audio/visual “mag­i­cal weapons” and incor­po­rat­ing his record­ings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Bur­roughs him­self made in 1966 with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Antony Balch, a dis­ori­ent­ing illus­tra­tion of the cut up tech­nique.

Not lim­it­ed to attack­ing annoy­ing Lon­don cof­fee­house own­ers, Bur­roughs’ sup­pos­ed­ly mag­i­cal inter­ven­tions in real­i­ty were in fact the fullest expres­sion of his cre­ativ­i­ty. As Ted Mor­gan writes, “the sin­gle most impor­tant thing about Bur­roughs was his belief in the mag­i­cal uni­verse. The same impulse that led him to put out curs­es was, as he saw it, the source of his writ­ing.” Read much more about Bur­roughs’ the­o­ry and prac­tice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Mag­i­cal Uni­verse of William S. Bur­roughs,” and hear the author him­self dis­course on the para­nor­mal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lec­ture below from a writ­ing class he gave in June, 1986.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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The Strange History of Lorem Ipsum: How Cicero’s Words Became the World’s Favorite Placeholder Text

in History, Technology | June 9th, 2026

Though sel­dom heard these days, the term “desk­top pub­lish­ing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the per­son­al com­put­er. It meant that one could cre­ate a pub­li­ca­tion with­out own­ing a press or con­tract­ing with an out­fit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writ­ing, design, and print­ing could take place on one’s desk, pro­vid­ed one had fur­nished it with the right com­put­er and acces­sories. From the mid-eight­ies through the ear­ly nineties, that meant an Apple Mac­in­tosh equipped with a Laser­Writer print­er and a copy of Aldus Page­Mak­er. For the first time, ordi­nary com­put­er users could cre­ate newslet­ters, brochures, and oth­er doc­u­ments assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a fea­ture abbre­vi­at­ed as WYSIWYG.

That’s not the only strange-look­ing piece of text encoun­tered by ear­ly desk­top pub­lish­ers. Since Page­Mak­er enabled users to cre­ate a lay­out before even hav­ing the words to fill it, it need­ed dum­my text to occu­py the emp­ty spaces in order to pro­vide a rea­son­able approx­i­ma­tion of how the print­ed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua,” that dum­my text begins, and it con­tin­ues as long as its defined field allows, repeat­ing itself as nec­es­sary. It may resem­ble Latin, but any­one with a decent under­stand­ing of that lan­guage won’t have to read much before notic­ing how odd­ly man­gled it is. So where did this mys­te­ri­ous text, still famil­iar to all lay­out edi­tors and graph­ic design­ers, actu­al­ly come from?

Pur­su­ing an answer to that ques­tion in her new video above, Rab­bit Hole cre­ator Emi­ly Zhang talks to indi­vid­u­als with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence includ­ing Lau­ra Per­ry, the for­mer cre­ative direc­tor at Aldus (a com­pa­ny named, inci­den­tal­ly, for the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry Venet­ian print­er Aldus Manu­tius). It was she who first made Lorem ipsum dig­i­tal, hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly used it as a whol­ly ana­log graph­ic design­er in the form of rub-off Letraset sheets. She man­u­al­ly entered it straight into Page­Mak­er off one such sheet, mak­ing occa­sion­al typos along the way. That was just anoth­er phase of trans­for­ma­tion Lorem ipsum had been under­go­ing since Cicero’s words were first bor­rowed — and chopped up, and mixed with frag­ments of oth­er lan­guages — to cre­ate what became the indus­try-stan­dard dum­my text.

In the process of fill­ing the gaps in this sto­ry, Zhang also talks to Richard McClin­tock, a pro­fes­sor of Latin long acknowl­edged as the pre­mier expert on Lorem ipsum. Ulti­mate­ly, she unearths a few truths that are new even to him, includ­ing an impor­tant one about the 1966 meet­ing at Letraset in which the idea was first float­ed of a sin­gle piece of dum­my text that could sub­sti­tute for most West­ern lan­guages. It was James Mosley, the high­ly knowl­edge­able head librar­i­an at the St. Bride Print­ing Library, who deliv­ered Letraset the Cicero quo­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly known as Forum ipsum, “which had become gar­bled by more than one type­set­ter sit­ting at his bench since the mid-fif­teen-hun­dreds.” Like­ly to remain in use as long as human­i­ty puts words on pages — paper, dig­i­tal, or what­ev­er comes next — Lorem ipsum sure­ly has a few more forms to take.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became Used by Type­set­ters Every­where

Explore a New Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of Print­ing Types, the Author­i­ta­tive His­to­ry of Print­ing & Typog­ra­phy from 1922

How Mag­a­zine Pages Were Cre­at­ed Before Com­put­ers: A Vet­er­an of the Lon­don Review of Books Demon­strates the Metic­u­lous, Man­u­al Process

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

in History, Maps | June 9th, 2026

Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out the last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one, argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Watch Ani­ma­tions Show­ing How Humans Migrat­ed Across the World Over the Past 60,000 Years

How the Human Pop­u­la­tion Reached 8 Bil­lion: An Ani­mat­ed Video Cov­ers 300,000 Years of His­to­ry in Four Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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The Official Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood YouTube Channel Goes Live: Watch Complete Episodes, Including the Very First

in Television | June 8th, 2026

A great many, and per­haps the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans now between their late twen­ties and ear­ly six­ties, have spent time in Mis­ter Rogers’ neigh­bor­hood. My own peri­od of reg­u­lar vis­i­ta­tion would have been in the nine­teen-eight­ies, a decade when Fred Rogers intro­duced his preschool-age view­ers to guest stars from Lou Fer­rig­no, in and out of Incred­i­ble Hulk make­up, to a ten-year-old boy with spina bifi­da. He also took on geopo­lit­i­cal issues, up to and includ­ing mutu­al­ly assured nuclear destruc­tion, and social ones, as on the mem­o­rable “divorce week” of 1981. Such top­i­cal broad­casts were mixed in with re-runs pro­duced as far back as 1969, the year Mis­ter Rogers got the coun­try’s atten­tion by invit­ing Offi­cer Clem­mons to share his wad­ing pool.

What those of us then tun­ing in did­n’t see was any­thing from the first, black-and-white sea­son of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood, which com­prised an aston­ish­ing 130 episodes that aired in 1968 alone. You can watch the series pre­miere at the top of the post, just recent­ly uploaded onto the show’s new offi­cial chan­nel.

It may come as a shock to see a 39-year-old Mis­ter Rogers, whom most of us remem­ber as the embod­i­ment of avun­cu­lar­i­ty or even grand­fa­ther­li­ness. But what’s even more strik­ing, if unsur­pris­ing, is that his onscreen per­sona, with its dis­in­cli­na­tion to talk down to chil­dren, nev­er real­ly changed. That sure­ly owes to its appar­ent iden­ti­ty with his off­screen per­sona: as he liked to put it, “kids can spot a pho­ny a mile away.”

“Aside from clips and com­pi­la­tions,” writes the New York Times’ Sopan Deb, “the chan­nel will make a selec­tion of full-length episodes avail­able glob­al­ly for the first time as well as some that haven’t aired in sev­er­al decades on PBS sta­tions.” With the show’s 60th anniver­sary com­ing up the year after next, the time does seem right to make as many of its 895 episodes as pos­si­ble avail­able to a new gen­er­a­tion. As of now, the chan­nel also offers the episodes with Offi­cer Clem­mons and the pool, Koko the Goril­la, and the mes­mer­iz­ing look inside the cray­on fac­to­ry. There’s even the crossover between Mis­ter Rogers and Bill Nye the Sci­ence Guy from 1997, by which time the lat­ter had become a tele­vi­sion icon to us mil­len­ni­als. Though we prob­a­bly did­n’t catch his vis­it at the time, we can now keep it book­marked to show our own kids — assum­ing they don’t dis­cov­er it first.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

Mr. Rogers’ Nine Rules for Speak­ing to Chil­dren (1977)

Mis­ter Rogers Cre­ates a Prime Time TV Spe­cial to Help Par­ents Talk to Their Chil­dren About the Assas­si­na­tion of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)

Mr. Rogers Intro­duces Kids to Exper­i­men­tal Elec­tron­ic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nel­son (1968)

Mis­ter Rogers Accepts a Life­time Achieve­ment Award, and Helps You Thank Every­one Who Has Made a Dif­fer­ence in Your Life

Watch the First Episode of Sesame Street and 140 Oth­er Free Episodes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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How Nick Drake’s “River Man” Has Captivated Generation after Generation of Listeners

in Music | June 8th, 2026

In 1999, Volk­swa­gen aired a tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial for the Golf Mk3 Cabrio. Deal­er­ships were soon inun­dat­ed with calls, as pop­u­lar cul­ture his­to­ry remem­bers it, but not from peo­ple inquir­ing about the car. Rather, they were des­per­ate to know the name of the song sound­track­ing the ad’s footage of a top-down night dri­ve to a house par­ty. For all they knew, it was a new sin­gle from an up-and-com­ing young man with an acoustic gui­tar and sen­si­tiv­i­ty exquis­ite enough to cut through the sound and fury of turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um pop. In fact, the song had come out 27 years before, and the artist had been dead for 25 of them. Thus began the obscure Eng­lish singer-song­writer Nick Drake’s belat­ed ascent to star­dom.

“Pink Moon,” the song from the VW Spot (a late replace­ment for The Church’s eight­ies hit “Under the Milky Way”), was the title cut from Drake’s third and final album, which closed a record­ing career not even three years long. It had begun in 1969, with the debut Five Leaves Left. If lis­ten­ers of the late nineties curi­ous enough to pick it up — or, as had just become pos­si­ble, down­load it from file-shar­ing net­works — could hard­ly have been dis­ap­point­ed, they still would­n’t have been pre­pared for its sec­ond track, “Riv­er Man.”

Described by Ian Mac­Don­ald as “one of the sky-high clas­sics of post-war Eng­lish pop­u­lar music,” the song com­bines Drake’s haunt­ing­ly evoca­tive lyri­cism and uncon­ven­tion­al gui­tar tun­ing with a rich lay­er of orches­trat­ed strings that stops just short of cloy­ing, all in jazzy 5/4 time.

As music YouTu­ber Charles Cor­nell points out in the video at the top of the post, you’ll no doubt rec­og­nize that time sig­na­ture from Dave Brubeck­’s “Take Five,” which makes that high­ly unusu­al rhythm feel nat­ur­al. So does “Riv­er Man,” though the more close­ly you lis­ten to it, the more musi­cal­ly dar­ing it sounds, even if you don’t have the the­o­ret­i­cal lan­guage to explain it as Cor­nell does. There is, for exam­ple, no cho­rus, which could­n’t have helped its chances of radio air­play at the time, nor could the song’s somber and reflec­tive mood. “The coun­ter­cul­ture was car­ni­va­lesque, its opti­mism com­pul­so­ry,” Mac­Don­ald writes. “Drake saw deep­er.” It’s hard­ly implau­si­ble, in fact, to read the song as a Blakean and Bud­dhis­tic alle­go­ry of an indi­vid­ual faced with a choice between the con­crete, cycli­cal real­i­ty of human affairs and the unknown realms beyond.

Drake com­posed “Riv­er Man” dur­ing his brief time at Cam­bridge, and the books writ­ten about him quote acquain­tances from that peri­od describ­ing it as a remark­able step for­ward in his artis­tic evo­lu­tion. Dur­ing the Five Leaves Left ses­sions, he sang and played gui­tar live with the orches­tra, whose arrange­ments (by the band­leader Har­ry Robin­son, then known on British TV for his nov­el­ty band Lord Rock­ing­ham’s XI) filled space Drake had delib­er­ate­ly left in the com­po­si­tion. The strings, in oth­er words, weren’t an incon­gru­ous attempt at sweet­en­ing, as Phil Spec­tor would per­form on the Bea­t­les’ “The Long and Wind­ing Road” the fol­low­ing year, but an inte­gral part of the song. Drake’s solo per­for­mance of it on BBC Radio 2’s Night Ride (a broad­cast host­ed by none oth­er than John Peel) sounds cap­ti­vat­ing, but incom­plete. On the Five Leaves Left ver­sion, every ele­ment works togeth­er to make “Riv­er Man” endur­ing — and, in every sense, tran­scen­dent.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How John Lennon Wrote the Bea­t­les’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

How Grace Slick Wrote “White Rab­bit”: The 1960s Clas­sic Inspired by LSD, Lewis Car­roll, Miles Davis’ Sketch­es of Spain, and Hyp­o­crit­i­cal Par­ents

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

How a Fake Car­toon Band Made “Sug­ar Sug­ar” the Biggest Sell­ing Hit Sin­gle of 1969

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books 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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