In all his years studying the life and times of Napoleon Bonaparte, Michael Broers, a professor of European history at the University of Oxford and historical advisor for Ridley Scott’s new biopic, never heard a more succinct assessment of the French emperor than that offered by his friend, Steven Englund. As Englund, an author and journalist, put it: “Napoleon isn’t complicated, but he is multifaceted.”

Scott’s Napoleon concentrates on the emperor’s most marketable facets: the lover and military commander. Central to the plot is his complicated relationship with Joséphine de Beauharnais, an aristocrat who knew how to manipulate his pride and insecurities. The clingy and even pathetic version of Napoleon seen behind closed doors is contrasted with the stern and stoic leader that appears on the battlefield — a leader whose conquests rival those of his personal heroes, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great.

Missing from the film are Napoleon’s lesser-known but arguably more important facets: the magistrate, the reformer, the philosopher, the socialite, and the workaholic, to name a few. Some of these were removed from the film due to time constraints. The emperor’s life was such an eventful one — Broers has written a total of nine books on him so far — that no filmmaker has yet managed to distill it into a single script (though Stanley Kubrick, whose unfinished screenplay is available online, came awfully close).

For instance, Scott does not show Napoleon’s ordinary childhood on the island of Corsica, or the formative years spent at a military academy in Brienne on the French mainland, which he attended on a scholarship. Also absent are Napoleon’s much loved but ultimately less capable brothers and sisters, whom he tried to install on various European thrones.

But some aspects of his life were ignored for marketing reasons. “One of the things I admire most about him was that he was a great man-manager,” Broers told Big Think. “He was a great chairman of committees. He made sure meetings were well-run and everybody had their say.”

When a fellow historian lamented Scott’s disinterest in the nuts and bolts of Napoleon’s governance, Broers said he saw where they were coming from but also that “it doesn’t make for good cinema.” He did note that governance, specifically Napoleon’s relationship with some of his generals, would play a bigger role in the upcoming director’s cut of the film, which is set to be more than four hours long.

Napoleon’s talents as a manager may have also been downplayed because they clashed with the story that Scott set out to tell. His decision to cast Joaquin Phoenix, an actor known for playing emasculated and maladjusted characters in films like Joker and Beau is Afraid, turns the film into a deconstruction of the Napoleonic myth: a look at the flawed, but at times relatable, human being behind the larger-than-life propaganda portraits the emperor commissioned. To show Napoleon as a talented politician may have detracted from the scenes that depict him as a pushover and so they were left out.

Although filmmakers are entitled to take creative liberties, it should be noted that the real Napoleon was indeed a man of contradictions. In private, he often acted like a completely different person than he did in public. Usually, this shift in behavior and mindset was deliberate. “He could focus on a job that needed to be done, a relationship that needed to be confronted — whatever it was,” Broers said.

Those close to the emperor knew and admired this skill, of which he famously said the following: “My mind is a chest of drawers. When I wish to deal with a subject, I shut all the drawers but the one in which the subject is to be found. When I am wearied, I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.”

Napoleon in love

Those who have criticized Phoenix’s emotionally unhinged portrayal of the emperor should read the love letters he wrote to Joséphine. They are mawkish to the point of reading like the poetry of a lovestruck teenager: “Soon, I hope, I will be holding you in my arms; then I will cover you with a million hot kisses, burning like the equator.”

His angry letters, brought on by her infidelity and lack of communication, are similarly childish: “I don’t love you anymore; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a vile, mean, beastly slut. You don’t write to me at all; you don’t love your husband; you know how happy your letters make him, and you don’t write him six lines of nonsense…”

So, while Napoleon’s on-screen relationship with Joséphine comes across as theatrical, it too is rooted in historical fact. Broers defends another part of the film that was met with criticism. Namely, after having an affair, Joséphine has Napoleon admit that without her he is nothing but a brute. Napoleon enthusiasts fume at the suggestion and are quick to point out that he was, on the contrary, extremely well-read, carrying a mini library with him wherever he went.

A fair point, except Joséphine isn’t referencing her husband’s intellect. She’s taunting him over his social status. “I think the line gets to the heart of something he understood,” argued Broers, “that he would appear a brute without her. She knew the aristocracy, and how to run a court. She knew manners, protocol, etiquette. He did not, and he didn’t entirely want to either.”

Lowborn, Napoleon had spent his entire life in the company of noblemen who thought themselves superior. He was bullied at Brienne, whose students hailed from the upper echelons of the ancien régime. Their ridiculing appears to have left scars, and as Napoleon rose through the ranks by the virtue of his merit, he seems to have taken a perverse joy in flaunting conventions. This is evident in the film, where domestic and foreign members of royalty are repeatedly astonished by his directness and (albeit exaggerated) vulgarity.

But directness and vulgarity only got Napoleon so far. Once he took over the country, he needed to learn to play the aristocrats’ game. That’s where Joséphine comes in. “She could be, as it were, the hostess with the mostest,” Broers explained. “She did that for him, and he appreciated it.”

Their power dynamic shifted around 1809, a process started in 1807, when Napoleon met and became intimate with a Polish noblewoman named Maria Waleska. After years of trying and failing to conceive a child together, it became clear that Joséphine was incapable of producing an heir. The revelation came as a shock to both but was especially difficult for Joséphine. As Broers pointed out, with the loss of her fertility, she had also lost the upper hand in the relationship. After their divorce, formalized in 1810, the roles reversed: Joséphine became clingy and Napoleon more distant.

Although the emperor remarried and had multiple mistresses, he remained connected to Joséphine — as depicted faithfully in Scott’s film. They were cordial even in separation, with Napoleon continuing to care for the children she had had by a previous marriage. His final words, uttered as he lay dying of stomach cancer on the island of St. Helena were “France,” “the army,” and, last, “Joséphine.”

This article What the new “Napoleon” film doesn’t tell you about the French emperor is featured on Big Think.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was emperor of Rome from 161 AD until his death in 180. The last in a series of rulers that historians now refer to as the Five Good Emperors, he was chosen as imperial heir when he was still a child. Raised with his future job in mind, Aurelius was pulled out of the empire’s questionable public school system and educated at home by Greek tutors and Stoic philosophers.

As intended, this world-class education ended up having a positive influence over Marcus Aurelius’ reign. His decisions were informed not by lust or jealousy or greed — as had been the case for many Julio-Claudian emperors — but by his deep understanding of law and logic. Often cited as the very embodiment of Plato’s “philosopher-king,” Marcus Aurelius always weighed his options, acting only when he felt he was making the right call.

Glimpses of the emperor’s internal dialogue are revealed to us through The Meditations, a diary that Marcus Aurelius kept up during his military campaigns in central Europe. The contents of the diary — a collection of aphorisms on topics such as the shortness of life, self-acceptance, and the relationship between reason and emotion — were, in all likelihood, never meant to be published. Indeed, Marcus Aurelius wrote The Meditations not to enlighten others, but to help himself carry the weight of his imperial responsibilities.

Both Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations occupy an important role in the history of Stoicism. This school of thought, founded in ancient Greece in the third century BC by Zeno of Citium, is very much alive today. In so many words, Stoicism — and especially the Roman variety represented by Marcus Aurelius — is about helping people live fulfilling lives by maximizing positive emotions, minimizing negative ones, and cultivating a virtuous character. Throughout The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius not only asks himself how he can be a better emperor, but also what it means to be a good man in general.

Marcus Aurelius was not a morning person

According to Marcus Aurelius, self-improvement should start the moment you wake up. This was of course easier said than done. A night-owl in a society that went to bed at dusk and rose at the brink of dawn, the emperor often struggled to get out of bed in the morning. For the vast majority of Romans, waking up was not a choice. The urban poor had to get out of bed because they had to report to work. The middle-classes, who were not a part of the labor force, had to get out of bed to meet with the wealthy patrons who paid for their work-free lifestyles, and the wealthy patrons had to get out of bed to receive their middle-class clients.

As emperor, Marcus Aurelius was just about the only person in the Roman empire who didn’t have to do anything. Many of his predecessors, including Nero and Caligula, spent their reigns dodging affairs of state, loafing about their estates, and emptying the imperial treasuries — all without a word of protest from their followers. If Marcus Aurelius ever wanted to take the day off and keep sleeping, no one would have been able to stop him from doing so.  

However, the emperor didn’t take days off. No matter how tired he was, he always got out of bed. In The Meditations, he reveals how he managed to motivate himself:

If his worst impulses refused to listen to reason, Marcus Aurelius would retort:   

How to become invincible

For Marcus Aurelius, waking up early was about more than making the most of your day. By forcing yourself to get out of bed even when you don’t want to, you are living life the way it ought to be lived, the way — as the emperor puts it — that nature intended. In this sense, his comments on his morning routine lead into a much broader discussion about virtue, which in The Meditations is defined as the pursuit of qualities such as wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.

Marcus Aurelius, it should be noted, defines virtue in the same way as does Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as the emperor repeatedly expresses his admiration of the thinker. “Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Pompeius,” he writes in The Meditations. “What are they by comparison with Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates?” According to classicist John Sellars, the emperor argues that the life of a philosopher is preferable to that of great politician’s “because it is more autonomous and involves fewer external demands.” Like Socrates, Marcus Aurelius believes that evil is a form of ignorance, and that an unflinching trust in reason can keep both at bay. Like Socrates, the emperor also believes that exercising self-control leads to both freedom and happiness. Because bodily desires can never be permanently satisfied, people should practice moderation rather than overindulgence. Marcus Aurelius harkens back to the Platonic dialogues:

This perfect and invincible spirit, the emperor explains, is the ultimate reward for those who live virtuous lives, because it renders them invulnerable to pain, suffering, discomfort, and other such negative emotions that Stoic philosophy seeks to nullify. “Provided you are doing are doing your proper work,” Marcus Aurelius concludes, “it should be indifferent to you whether you are cold or comfortably warm, whether drowsy or with sufficient sleep, whether your report is evil or good, whether you are in the act of death or doing something else.”

The emperor’s invincible spirit allowed him to endure hardships and overcome challenges that would have crushed less virtuous men. Accepting the indifference of both nature and history, Rome’s one true philosopher-king kept himself composed as he jumped from one military campaign into another, dealt with the betrayals of close friends, and processed the deaths of his loved ones.

As a result, he is not only remembered as a great emperor, but also as a good man.

This article Do you struggle getting out of bed in the morning? Marcus Aurelius can help is featured on Big Think.

For one reason or another, you sometimes have to talk about a book you haven’t read. It might be that you want to impress your boss or appear intellectual on a first date. It might be that you’ve got a selection of books on your shelves that one looks suspiciously new, with its pristine spine and unthumbed pages. So, what do you do if someone asks you about those books? How do you respond if someone presses you for more than a blurb’s worth of information?

To help you on your way to Blagville, we’ve compiled five of the most common books people pretend to read and explain how to bluff your way through a conversation about them.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Bluffer’s blurb

It’s a snowy, cold evening in St. Petersburg in 1805. The rich and mighty of Russian society are hobnobbing and chortling away with caviar and clinking glasses of bubbly. Bursting in on the scene is Napoleon with his undefeated French army. Russian high society reels. It’s time to go to war. No more fireplace flirting and ballroom dances. Now is the time for patriotism, comradeship, and frozen battlegrounds steaming with spilled blood.

What should I say?

War and Peace is nearly 600,000 words long. No one can remember the whole thing. The best bet is to feign memory loss or at least memory fragmentation: “Oh, I read it a while ago, but I can remember only a few things.”

What are those few things? First, there is the jarring dissonance between the comfortable domesticity of Mother Russia and the brutality of war. Second, the transformations of Prince Andrei and Natasha. Prince Andrei hates his aristocratic life and initially welcomes the war and the opportunity for glory. After a near-death experience, he looks for love and deeper meaning. Natasha is a carefree and naïve socialite. But various heartbreaks and the ongoing war turn her from an impulsive girl into a resilient and mature woman. “The personal narratives of the characters essentially mirror the geopolitical ones” is a great line to drop.

Ulysses, by James Joyce

Bluffer’s blurb

Imagine the closest thing you can to someone’s stream of consciousness written on a page. But this is not a curated, edited, and formatted diary entry, but a messy, confusing, random slideshow of thoughts. This is Ulysses. It’s a human mind’s experience in the streets of Dublin on an ordinary day in 1904.

What should I say?

Ulysses is the literary gemstone for any English literature graduate, an experiment in language as much as plot. When blagging, you will want to hug closely to the deliberately enigmatic aspects of the novel: “I never felt I could entirely grasp what was going on. It was like letting the story flow over me.” Mention how each chapter has a different tone and style, and how that reflects human life well. Humans change all the time, and so a stream of consciousness will change too.

The book also has an epic, mythological feel to it. There are many allusions to the Odyssey, for instance, so you could mention how it felt mysterious and yet strangely familiar.

In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust

Bluffer’s blurb

In many ways, Proust is similar to Joyce — which is a nice blagging line itself. His multi-volume novel is written in a stream of consciousness as well; however, this stream meanders into the hidden geography of Proust’s memory. There is a plot of sorts, but it’s more of a Tarantino time-warp of overlapping plots that (kind of) converge into a whole.

What should I say?

Proust is like an invitation to remember aspects of your own life. The defining feature of In Search of Lost Time is “involuntary memories.” These are memories that hit you like an unexpected steam train when you’re busy doing something else. A wiff of a passerby’s perfume conjures up an image of your dead grandmother. A song reminds you of that summer when you got your exam results. Proust’s autobiographical, gate-crashing memories elicit your own.

Say something like, “Funnily enough, whenever I read Proust’s recollections, I have my own. The way he talks about those madeleines made me consider how important food is to memory.”

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville

Bluffer’s blurb

Moby Dick is about obsession. It’s about that pathologically addictive and irrepressibly driven aspect we all have for something. Ahab lost his leg to the white whale — which is fair grounds for revenge in his book — and the novel chronicles the dark, neurotic extremes he undergoes to hunt the limb-munching cetacean.

What should I say?

Try and defend a “hot take” with this one. Mention something like, “Most people focus on the obsessive aspect of hunting for something that gets away, the white whale that can never be caught. But I think it’s more about how contagious obsession is.”

In Moby-Dick, Ahab is not only obsessed; he needs everyone else to share in his obsession. In one evocative scene, Ahab cajoles, bribes, and threatens his crew to take up his mania. Like anyone who’s truly, fanatically, madly obsessed, he needs everyone to feel the same way. Make this about the dark side of neurosis — not only on the sufferer but on those who are damaged in their wake.

Paradise Lost, by John Milton

Bluffer’s blurb

Paradise Lost is Milton’s version of a Christian epic saga. Ostensibly, it’s a 17th-century epic poem about angels and demons — a Hollywood screenwriter’s dream of celestial battles pitting heavenly forces against the depths of hell. But it’s really about the human struggle between good and evil.

What should I say?

Rather than feign memory loss, feign confusion. Paradise Lost is so popular and so enduring that its influence can’t be overstated. Say something like, “I’m not sure anymore what is actually Paradise Lost and what I’ve seen in paintings or popular culture since.” It’s in Frankenstein; it’s in His Dark Materials. Any movie or TV plot featuring warring angels and demons is basically Milton with special effects.

Of course, if you want to blag, you can’t rest on “Well, I saw the movie.” Mention two things: First, how Milton uses metaphor and poetry so artfully to evoke incredible feelings and imagery. Second, talk about how subtle and complex Satan is. He is not diabolical. He is not totally lost. He is a fallen angel with legitimate grievances.

Oh, and be sure to mention how William Blake even reinterpreted Satan as “the hero.” You can even toss in the famous footnote from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “[Milton] was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Now that’s some next level blagging.

This article 5 books you probably haven’t read (and how to pretend you have) is featured on Big Think.

From the Greek myth of Prometheus to Goethe’s Faust, world literature has no shortage of stories about people whose hunger for knowledge ultimately causes them pain. The popularity of these stories has contributed to the stereotype of the moody intellectual: cynical, pessimistic, depressed. Think of the philosopher who, through logic and reason, concludes that “God is dead,” or the cosmologist who, peering through their telescope, attempts in vain to fathom the unfathomable size of the Universe.

This stereotype, while rich in narrative potential, is just that: a stereotype. In truth, studies show that the higher someone’s level of education, the better they can navigate the challenges of mental illness. Researchers mostly observe a negative correlation between melancholy and intellect, not a positive one, and many leading thinkers view their knowledge as a blessing rather than a curse.

“I actually find adopting a cosmological viewpoint to be kind of…comforting?” Matthew Bothwell, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, told Big Think. “There’s something about appreciating the smallness and insignificance of my little human life that I find quite relaxing. No matter how much politics gets me down, or life’s stresses build up, we’re all just temporary collections of atoms, and the Milky Way will keep on spinning long after our brief candle has gone out. It puts our problems in perspective.”

Even scholars who study subjects as difficult and distressing as the Holocaust do not succumb to sorrow, though this doesn’t mean they are made of stone. “There have been moments where I needed to take a break,” says Omer Bartov, an Israeli historian who since 2000 has served as the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide at Brown University.

When Bartov moved from German military history to Holocaust studies, he focused on first-hand accounts from survivors. Not only because these were valuable and deserved attention, but also because there was “a tendency in Western writing about the Holocaust to use figures, or talk about how it was planned and executed. There was, not a repulsion, but a discomfort with examining its effect on individual human beings.” Most challenging were accounts written by people who, during the Holocaust, had been of the same age as his daughter. “You begin to imagine your own child in that kind of situation.”

Equally distressing are moments when Bartov anticipates seeing history repeat itself. “Certainly the world we live in today seems to have forgotten whatever lessons it drew from the vast explosion of violence that occurred in World War II and after, which is a very depressing observation,” he told Big Think. Bartov added that this predicament is not unique to him but shared by historians who specialize in other themes and periods. “In general, people have forgotten the relatively recent past, and repeat the same cycles of populist, authoritarian regimes.”

Corpses in your head

While Bartov’s personal coping strategies are not the same as the ones you’d find in your typical self-help book, that doesn’t make them any less effective. “I guess I belong to a generation that is less concerned with that kind of terminology,” he said, referring to contemporary buzzwords like “mental well-being.”

“When you study war, you can think about it in two ways. One: This is so hard for me. Why am I doing this when I could engage in something more cheerful? The other is: How can I feel bad when what I’m reading and writing about is so much worse? Instead of feeling bad about myself, I am reminded that the people I study were undergoing far greater traumas than I ever had to face. It is a kind of privilege. Added to that is the fact that is important to tell these stories since many people do shy away from telling them because they are so distressing.”

To an extent, guidelines of scientific inquiry protect him from psychological damage, with historians being expected to establish a so-called “critical distance” between themselves and the subjects they investigate. Allow yourself to become too involved, or too emotionally attached to your research, and you run the risk of compromising the integrity of said research.

“You can retain distance mentally,” Bartov noted, “but also physically, by dividing your day so you are not constantly immersed in your work. You have to make sure you do other things, at least so you do not go to bed every night with a bunch of corpses in your head.”

Other things can be many things — music, films, walks — whatever allows you to take your mind to a different, less threatening place. Bartov’s preferred thing is fiction writing, specifically historical fiction. His latest book, The Butterfly and the Axe, is set during the Holocaust, just like his academic research. Still, when operating in the realm of fiction, Bartov can exercise a degree of control that he does not have in his day job: “I have actually found that to be the big difference, between understanding the chaos that genocide victims feel and cannot or rarely manage to overcome, and your role as a writer, who is putting things in order.”

Bartov’s method of coping with negative emotions reflects that of the Holocaust survivors he has worked with. “People who have confronted horror personally, not just vicariously, have told me they don’t indulge in that,” he said. “They are not terribly interested in delving into the traumas they have encountered and how they became part of them.”

If they did confront their past, they did so as writers — memoirists, scientists, or scholars. It’s an approach that, as mentioned, creates a sense of separation while also allowing people to turn chaos into order and make sense of senselessness.  

Mental health and academia

The relationship between mental health and academic research, long overlooked, is finally receiving more attention on college campuses. Still, there is an ongoing debate about how the issue should be addressed.

 “As a university professor, I know there is much worry about the well-being of students, safe spaces, and not using terminology that might trouble young people,” Bartov said. “But what I deal with is troubling. And when I teach it, I tell my students it is deeply troubling and that they might not want to take this class. If you do want to know about these issues, you need some resilience.”

His attitudes toward mental health may differ from those of his students and fellow administrators, but they have thus far proven effective. At least, for him.

“I guess I sometimes get a bit impatient with the expectation of mental fragility,” he said. “Not actual mental difficulties which people can have, but this worry that we might experience something upsetting. We live and have always lived in a very upsetting world. You cannot have filters. You have to learn how to cope with it.”

This article “You need resilience”: How a genocide scholar faces history’s darkest moments is featured on Big Think.

Certain books are better known for being hard-to-finish rather than widely read. While taking the time to sit down and work through a difficult book can be a big ask, the rewards for doing so are often great. Furthermore, the experience of absorbing great literature or learning from a heavy tome can be a prize in and of itself.

Today, we’ll look at seven famously difficult books — and why you should read them, anyway.

A Brief History of Time

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”

Stephen Hawking’s bestselling book on cosmology dives into the history of human understanding of the Universe, explains our current models for how everything works, and discusses the areas where physics is going in an accessible and witty manner. While covering some esoteric topics, the book famously contains only a single mathematical equation, E = mc².

Despite selling 25 million copies, the book is the namesake for the Hawking Index — a not entirely scientific measure of how much of a book people will read before quitting. The index measures the five most highlighted portions in the Amazon Kindle version of the book for how close they are to the beginning. The idea is that the closer these are to the beginning, the less likely it is that most readers make it to the end of the book. Hawking’s book scores 6.6% on the index, suggesting that most who pick it up never finish — or even get close to finishing it.

Those who do finish it not only get to enjoy Dr. Hawking’s famed wit but also come to understand how human reason has evolved and, with it, our conception of our place in the Universe. If that’s not a good reason to finish a book, then what is?

One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

The multi-generational story of the Buendía family of Macondo, Colombia, penned by Gabriel García Márquez, has sold 50 million copies and can be read in dozens of languages. It is considered the masterpiece of its author and one of the best works of literature to come out of Latin America.

The book has a complex storyline and is open to several interpretations of its central themes. It provides both a linear plot and alternative ways of looking at how time functions for the various characters. The magical realism gives us both fantastical events in a fictional town alongside real events influencing a family history, which can be confusing for those unfamiliar with the genre.

However, the book has earned its praise for a reason. Pulitzer Prize winner William Kennedy went so far as to say it should be “required reading for the entire human race.”

Ulysses

“Love loves to love love.”

A classic of modernist literature that follows a man around Dublin on a typical day, Ulysses by James Joyce is one of the go-to examples of a literary masterpiece that is terribly difficult to read while also being held in high regard by those who manage to do it.

The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style — perhaps the best example of it there is — that can be difficult and tiring to work through if you are unprepared. It is also a long text, coming in at 265,222 words. (The average novel is less than half of that.) The shifting styles of writing that reflect the changing states of mind of the main characters can also be confusing.

Ulysses, by virtue of its stream-of-consciousness style, gives us a look into the lives of its characters as they are lived rather than just how they are observed. In addition, the richness of the connections between different parts of the text and its allusions to other works helps give it a sense of wholeness, making the reader feel like they have a connection to places and events that they have only seen through the characters’ eyes.

But if you can’t finish it, don’t feel too bad. British author Virginia Woolf — who used stream-of-consciousness herself — got 200 pages in and then decided she couldn’t be bothered to get through the rest.

Catch-22

“They don’t have to show us Catch-22,” the old woman answered. “The law says they don’t have to.”

“What law says they don’t have to?”

“Catch-22.”

A novel written by Joseph Heller about a U.S. Army Air Corps bombardier during the Italian campaign in WWII, Catch-22 explores the madness inherent in every bureaucracy, the comedy found inside every tragedy, and the paradoxes that every life includes that cannot be addressed by logic alone. The novel is the direct source for the term “Catch-22” (a situation in which contradictory rules prevent a resolution) and the inspiration for the term “black comedy” (which was first used to describe the novel).

The book is famously confusing with opaque language, an extremely non-linear plot, and story elements that alternate between highly grounded, bizarre, and horrific with great speed. Despite this, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, said that Catch-22 was the only war novel she ever read that made sense. It is also hilarious and can help readers come to terms with absurdity and moral grayness in their own lives.

Les Misérables

“If we would take a little pains, the nettle would be useful; we neglect it, and it becomes harmful. Then we kill it. How much men are like the nettle! My friends, remember this, that there are no weeds, and no worthless men, there are only bad farmers.”

Written by Victor Hugo, this is the tale of Jean Valjean, a group of young revolutionaries, a young girl named Cosette, and a determined policeman who views the world in black and white as they navigate life in France as it transitions out of the post-revolutionary era.

The text is a massive 545,925 words, and much of the book is unconnected to the main plot line. These chapters contain discussions on topics such as monasteries, architecture, French history, and the Parisian sewer system. That many choose instead to watch one of the movie versions — which can still be up to five hours long — is unsurprising.

Despite the length of the text and sections that are so disconnected from the plot that even Hugo names the chapters “Parenthesis,” the full version of the book rewards any reader willing to consider every chapter. The subjects covered apply to humanity at all times in all places, while the questions raised almost certainly bother the reader as much as they do the characters.

The Tale of Genji

“’No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly,’ His Highness replied, ‘…and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.’”

Authored by Murasaki Shikibu, this is a story exploring the lives of the members of the Japanese Imperial Court and has a claim to being the first novel ever written. Tracing the fall of a prince as he is demoted to a member of the common rabble, the book gives us an in-depth look at a world long vanished.

The original text that we have, part of which appears to be lost, is in a long-dead version of classical Japanese. It is only in modern times that translations of the text into contemporary Japanese and English have given the book a wider audience. The original text does not name the characters, expects the reader to fully understand 11th century Japanese poetry, and has so many homophones that many readers are left unable to understand what’s going on. Attempts to translate the work must balance faithfulness to the original text with a desire for readability — a tightrope walk that often satisfies no one.

For those who find a translation they like, the book not only provides an inside account of classical Japan but also a sense of how the medium of the novel has evolved over the last thousand years.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics.”

An examination of modern capitalism through history and political economy lenses, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty set off a firestorm of debate when it was first published in 2013. In the years since its publication, a number of follow-up books, including some by Dr. Piketty himself, have explored the foundations and implications of this text’s fundamental thesis — namely, that returns on investments are higher than wages and likely will continue to be.

The book can be a bit dense for those who have not studied economics; it scores even lower in the Hawking Index than A Brief History of Time, coming in at 2.4%. It is nearly 600 pages long and covers economic history, an infamously dry subject.

However, the book still has the power to help readers understand modern economic and social problems and can provide a course in the history of modern economies. While Dr. Piketty has tempered the positive reception of the book and the theory put forward in it by reminding us of how messy economics can be, it remains a vital tool for understanding the world we live in.

This article 7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books is featured on Big Think.

When creatives have a hugely successful, decades-long hit, they face a problem: How do they age their characters? For long-running soap operas, the answer involves killing the characters off or having them walk into an ambiguous and off-camera sunset.

What can creatives do, though, when their characters are irreplaceable? How can they maintain the spirit of the story when it and all of its characters have 80 years of history behind them? This is a problem facing Marvel Comics.

For instance, in 1962 Spider-Man made his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15. One of the reasons Spider-Man proved so popular was that, like his readership, he was a naïve, idealistic teenager. He’s a nerdy high school kid who suddenly gets great power. But if Marvel were obeying the laws of nature, Spider-Man should now be 77 years old. He’d spend less time web-slinging criminals and more time web-crocheting mittens, and he’d be wall-crawling into bed by 9 p.m. with a warm mug of cocoa.

To stay fresh and true to the spirit of its comics, Marvel has had to reinvent, reimagine, and redraw some of its biggest names. Often, that has been a seamless and enjoyable success. Sometimes, though, it’s been a Hulk-smashing mess.

To dive more into the reasons behind these “retcons” and to explore some of the more curious examples, Big Think reached out to Sean Howe, a comic writer and author of the hugely popular Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Captain America

Captain America was initially born as a World War II hero. He was a Nazi-punching, freedom-loving, flag-waving superhero who sported a cool shield. In the decades that followed, fascism was no longer enemy number one; communism was.

“In the mid-fifties, Captain America became someone who was basically constantly battling communists,” Howe says. He resembled an anti-communist hitman on McCarthy’s payroll.

In some ways, it’s appropriate that Captain America would be a character who changes his ideologies and personality the most. As a hero meant to be the literal embodiment of a nation, it makes sense for him to mirror the ebbs and tides of that nation.

But there came a backlash. In the 1970s, many Marvel comic artists, such as Steve Englehart, were fairly left-leaning. How could they glorify a socialist-hating “rabid right-winger”? Well, they said he was an imposter. This 1950s Cap was actually a villain named William Burnside, aka Commie Smasher or Bad Cap. Burnside took his own variation of Captain America’s superhero serum, but it went wrong and left him psychotic.

The Asian War

To avoid all these problems, Marvel tends to frame their comics in an atemporal, fictional, unspecified world. There’s a look and a feel to things, but little to pin the characters down to a specific year. One jungle-sized exception to this was the Vietnam War.

The problem is that a historically defined event like the Vietnam War limits and traps many of the heroes involved. Tony Stark developed his first Iron Man suit to escape Vietnamese captivity. The Punisher was a marine largely defined by his tours of duty. Nicky Fury, Hawkeye, the Falcon, Captain America, and Wolverine were all, at some point, fighting in Vietnam fifty years ago.

As Howe points out, “The Vietnam War was aging Marvel characters too much. So, they came up with this fictional war, and Vietnam was collapsed into different Asian Wars.” Known as the “Siangong War,” this vaguely defined conflict went on somewhere in or around Vietnam. Was Stark in Vietnam? Sure, but do you mean the Vietnam War of the 1970s or the scuffle of last year? It’s best not to ask too many questions.

The resurrection of … everyone

Captain America’s sidekick was thought to have died in World War II. There were funeral scenes, black-toned mourning panels, and Captain wrestling with his grief. According to Howe, up until the 1990s or even early 2000s, most people thought, “That’s it; Bucky is never coming back.”

But, of course, he did. “There’s no character that hasn’t come back to life,” Howe tells us, and the reason is simple: money. “How are you going to limit your intellectual property by something so arbitrary as death? You are concerned with what makes a good story. You know, it’s money left on the table if you don’t revive this popular character.”

Spider-Man makes millions. The Fantastic Four keep shareholders happy. Why would any profit-minded businessman deliberately kill these golden geese?

Power creep and power grabs

Even if heroes don’t die very often, Marvel may still decide to drastically reimagine the essence of that character. They might not be written out of the story, but they are changed so much that they become, for all intents and purposes, different. Howe told us that few heroes have their powers or abilities fundamentally changed, but it is quite common for a character’s strength to be downgraded subtly and quietly.

This is what happened with the Scarlet Witch. Over many years and a series of comics, her powers grew such that no one else could realistically take her on. She could one-punch or one-spell any villain that popped along, which doesn’t make for a fun read.

So, Marvel turned Scarlet Witch into a villain. “They decided, ‘Oh, this much power would warp her mind, and so she’ll die from this or she’ll go insane,” Howe tells us. All that unbridled, unmatched power would “turn her evil and create all this chaos and destruction so that then she’ll become undone and they’ll start over again.”

Other times, the canon respects god-tier characters such as The Watchers. Howe thinks this is mostly out of respect for Jack Kirby’s legacy — as Kirby not only introduced many of these characters but is considered one of the most influential creators in comics. Most of the time, though, Marvel has to limit and reduce “god-level” powers.

“You know, you’ve got these Norse gods, and you’ve got these Greek gods, and they need to be turned into Marvel versions of those. They have to somehow reconcile their powers. There’s Odin and there’s Zeus, and then there are, like, six different kinds of Satan. Trying to figure out who takes precedence over who is, like, impossible. So, they just leave it open.”

Ultimately, that is a good thing for comic fans. It gives them more to debate in the pub or in the car on the way back from the cinema.

This article Comic book expert explains how our favorite heroes have evolved over time is featured on Big Think.

“There is nothing new under the sun.” That’s a sentiment that fans of storytelling may be especially familiar with. Sometimes, it can feel as though books recycle the same settings, characters, concepts, and ideas from past works.

Just consider how many fantasy novels are populated with elves, dwarfs, and orcs. These are fantasies. The authors are free to populate their fantastical worlds with whatever creatures their imaginations can conjure, yet they stick to the tried-and-true. Heck, even Ecclesiastes — the book of the Old Testament where our opening quote comes from — is one of the many works in the vanity literature genre to feature a message of life’s futility.

But every now and then, a work comes around that — while not wholly original — mixes and mingles its ingredients in ways that captivate readers and other authors. These works beget lineages of homages, imitators, and successors, and only with the advantage of hindsight do we look back and realize they pioneered new subgenres of literature. Here are five such books:

1. The Castle of Otranto (Gothic horror)

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) tells the story of a doomed medieval family line. Manfred, the lord of the titular castle, is set to marry his son, Conrad, to the princess Isabella. However, Conrad’s tragic death and an ancient prophecy foretelling the fall of the lordship of Otranto leads Manfred to try to divorce his wife and marry the young Isabella himself, a decision that will set off a chain of dreadful events and shocking revelations.

While some claim Otranto is the first true fantasy story — more on that later — it’s typically considered the first work of Gothic horror. The novel established many of the sub-genre’s conventions by blending dark castles, family secrets, a sinister villain, a damsel in distress, and supernatural haunts, all of which serve to deliver heaps of tragedy and murder upon its characters. Its later subtitle, “A Gothic Story” — added to the third edition — even graced the sub-genre with its moniker.

The genre proved hugely popular in the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, culminating in such impressive works as Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre (1847), respectively. From there, it began to diffuse into the horror genre more generally, influencing the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It also inspired the next book on our list.

2. Frankenstein (science fiction)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant scientist who loses his mother to scarlet fever. In his grief, he researches a way to return life to the dead but becomes so horrified at the Creature he creates that he abandons it and flees.

As with The Castle of Otranto, this decision leads to deadly secrets, a damsel in distress, supernatural haunts, and, ultimately, a tragic conclusion. Swap out dark castles for secluded laboratories, and you’ve got a Gothic novel infused with Romantic philosophy, which was how the novel was received shortly after its debut.

Today, however, many now consider Frankenstein to be the first work of science fiction. That’s because Shelley’s supernatural horrors weren’t born out of gods, magic, or alchemy. They were animated by science — or, at least, the scientific understanding of the day.

For instance, in a series of experiments, Luigi Galvani zapped electrical pulses into dead frog legs to make them twitch. He even held demonstrations where he lined up frogs’ legs on metal wire so they would “dance” during electrical storms (as scientists did back in the day, apparently). Galvani called his discovery “animal electricity” and even hinted that it was a type of life force. 

Experiments like Galvani’s lead Shelley to question the value of scientific progress unfettered from morality and responsibility. It’s a classic theme that has been explored at length in science fiction ever since.

3. The Lord of the Rings (high fantasy)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) tells the tale of the Dark Lord Sauron’s invasion of the fantasy world of Middle-earth. Facing such an immense and evil power, the people of Middle-earth send a Fellowship of men, dwarfs, elves, and hobbits on an epic quest to destroy the One Ring — and with it the source of Sauron’s power.

For many, The Lord of the Rings is the quintessential fantasy story. But it’s certainly not the first. Some give that honor to George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), a novel about a young man transported to a dreamlike world in search of ideal feminine beauty. But is Phantastes a fantasy or a fairy tale? Others will claim Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1590), One Thousand and One Nights, or even Homer’s The Odyssey. But are these fantasies or works of epic poetry, folktale, and mythology, respectively?

In short, determining a true fantasy pioneer is probably impossible. It depends on how one defines the genre. We’ll find more solid footing by sticking to one of the genre’s many subgenres, and here, Lord of the Rings has left an indelible impression on high fantasy.

Works in this subgenre take place in alternative worlds (as opposed to those where the characters travel from our world to the fantastical one, a la Narnia). Their plots center on world-sized conflicts, typically against great evils. They also tend to include fantastical creatures and magical elements. These conventions sum up Tolkien’s epic nicely, and his influence helps explain why those elves and orcs have become so peskily common in fantasy.

4. A Universal History of Infamy (magical realism)

Unlike the other works on this list, Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy (1935) isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories. Each is an account of a real-life criminal, such as John Murrell, Billy the Kid, and Kira Yoshinaka. But Borges’s stories aren’t historic retellings. They are metafictions — stories that allude to the fact that they are stories — that blur the lines between reality and fiction.

Magical realism lives on that blurry border. Works in this genre take place in our mundane reality but add a dash of the fantastical. Unlike fantasy, where the magic is treated as extraordinary, magical realism is all very matter-of-fact. This guy levitates. She talks to animals. This point in space contains all other points in space. That’s just how it is.

While the term was originally used to characterize a style of German expressionist painting in the 1920s, it ultimately came to describe a trend in Latin-American literature that emerged in the mid-20th century. In analyzing the trend, literary critic Angel Flores adopted the label “magical realism” and placed Borges at the starting line.

But if Borges established the genre, his magical realist successors, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, have since become synonymous with it. These Spanish-American authors have in turn influenced the likes of Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami.

5. Neuromancer (cyberpunk)

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” This line opens William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the story of a hacker hired to infiltrate a corporate network and free two artificial intelligences. To do so, he’ll have to avoid greedy corporations and their private military forces with the aid of a group of criminals, including the cybernetically enhanced femme fatale Molly Millions.

Cyberpunk takes Shelley’s warning against inhumane progress and amps it up with punk rock flair. Its dystopian futures are rampant with drugs, social decay, and urban sprawl. Its heroes are anti-establishment, card-carrying members of the Sex Pistols party. But perhaps the genre’s most distinctive feature is its post-human technology — where the internet isn’t limited to screens but flows directly through people’s nervous systems.

Gibson sets this stage and drenches it in neo-noir neon. Again, Neuromancer may not be the true trailblazer. In fact, Gibson’s own short story Johnny Mnemonic (1981) probably has the stronger claim. But that story feels like a trial run. It was his debut novel that electrified the genre and inspired works like Snow Crash (1992) and Altered Carbon (2002), and synced so perfectly with the new storytelling medium of video games.

Unending conversations

You may have noticed that these genre pioneers don’t neatly separate what came before, nor do they strictly define what came after.

By our description above, one could easily claim William Shakespeare beat Walpole to the Gothic punch with Hamlet. Similarly, depending on what conventions are highlighted, William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896) may be considered high-fantasy’s true progenitor. And are New Wave works like Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) the forerunners to cyberpunk or the genre’s founding fathers?

The thing is, genres aren’t classifications of literary works the same way taxonomy systematically arranges plants and animals according to their natural relationships. Unlike species, literary genres can borrow what DNA they wish for any other work to create something that defies orderly classification. (Then again, there are also egg-laying mammals, so it’s not like nature is that neatly organized either.)

Rather than think of genres as categories, it’s better to see them as conversations. They are the centuries-long dialogues between authors and readers, and each new work acts as a voice that discusses, revitalizes, and reimagines what came before it. Sometimes, these conversations can head off into new, unexplored tangents, and those tangents may cross paths later on.

So, while there may be nothing new under the sun, there will always be new ways to discuss stories. (Yes, even that umpteenth fantasy featuring elves and orcs.)

This article 5 brilliant books that pioneered new subgenres of literature is featured on Big Think.

In January 1926, a new fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, gave his first lecture. It was standing room only, and he had to lead his audience into a larger room, so they could all sit down. This was the start of a career in which he educated generations of undergraduates. One course of his lectures, delivered many times at Oxford, was eventually published as The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1964. 

This don’s name was C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), who had died the previous year, celebrated for his Narnia series of children’s books, as a Christian apologist and an expert on late medieval English literature. In his academic work, Lewis fought back against the myth that medieval people thought the Earth was flat. As he wrote in The Discarded Image, ‘Physically considered, the Earth is a globe; all the authors of the high Middle Ages are agreed on this . . . The implications of a spherical Earth were fully grasped.’ 

However, when it came to creating his own world, Lewis found the Globe was not fit for his purposes. Narnia was flat. In the third Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, King Caspian leads an expedition across the Eastern Ocean to the end of the world. As the ship sails towards the dawn, the rising sun grows progressively larger, eventually becoming five or six times bigger. On the far side of the Ocean, the water is fresh and shallow, and covered with lilies. When the draught of the ship means it can go no further, a mouse, who is part of the crew, boards a tiny rowboat and paddles his way through a wall of water where he disappears. Beyond, the people on deck can just make out the high mountains of Aslan’s land, perhaps the earthly paradise of medieval legend.

The amount of commentary on C. S. Lewis, by both scholars and fans, is vast. Many have written about Narnia’s geography, but no one has given an adequate solution to why Lewis made it flat. After all, he was at pains to note in The Discarded Image that this was not how medieval people saw their world. Rather than over-analysing the issue, it seems likely we can find the answer in an exchange between King Caspian and a pair of English schoolboys called Edmund and Eustace, who have been magically transported to the [ship] Dawn Treader. Eustace thinks it ridiculous to say the world has an edge, but Edmund realizes that Narnia might be different to our own planet. Caspian is thrilled to learn about this: 

‘Do you mean to say,’ asked Caspian, ‘that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you’ve never told me! It’s really too bad of you. Because we have fairy tales in which there are round worlds, and I’ve always loved them.

I never believed that there were any real ones . . . It must be exciting to live on a thing like a ball. Have you ever been to the parts where people walk about upside down?’ 

Edmund shook his head. ‘And it isn’t like that,’ he added. ‘There’s nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you are there.’

Lewis seemed to grasp how fantastical the theory of the Globe would be for someone who lived on a flat world – more like a myth than reality. But he also saw (this is a point he made many times) how inured to wonder we become once we take something for granted. Narnia was flat because it’s modelled on the mappa mundi, rich in Christian symbolism and different from the world revealed by science. But Lewis also wanted us to understand that it is possible to move between the symbolic and the real, if you know how. And from the inside, the symbolic world looks just as real as ours. 

C.S. Lewis was not the only author to make his fantasy world flat. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), another Oxford expert on medieval literature, did the same. The events in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit take place on a spherical earth. However, this had not always been the shape of the world. Thousands of years prior to the events in those books, evil men from the island of Númenor had attempted to invade the land of the elves in the far west. The dark lord Sauron had corrupted Númenóreans into believing that by doing so, they could obtain immortality. The elves prayed for deliverance. God, called Ilúvatar, uprooted the Undying Lands from the circle of the world, making it completely inaccessible to men. A great chasm opened up, which swallowed Númenor. Finally, the gods, authorized by Ilúvatar, ‘bent back the edges of Middle-earth, and . . . they made it into a globe, so that however far a man should sail he could never again reach the true West, but came back weary at last to the place of his beginning’.

Tolkien’s academic speciality was Anglo-Saxon literature, and his particular passion was the Old English epic Beowulf. This story is set in a world that is a disc. In ‘The Monster and the Critics’, a lecture Tolkien gave on Beowulf in 1936, he noted that the poet ‘and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great Earth, ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof’. He expanded on this point in his commentary on the poem, explaining that while educated people around AD 800 might well have been aware the Earth is round, this is not reflected in the verse and probably wasn’t part of the imaginative world of its hearers either.

England doesn’t have a fully developed mythology like the Greeks or Vikings. Perhaps it was lost or it never existed. Tolkien set out to create one. As this wasn’t a scholarly exercise, he was free to pilfer tropes from surviving stories in other related cultures, be they Irish sagas or French romances. For example, at the dawn of time, Tolkien wrote, the whole land was illuminated by two trees – an idea inspired by a passage from one of the medieval romances about Alexander the Great. When these trees were destroyed, fragments of their light formed the Sun and the Moon. 

According to Norse mythology – another influence on Tolkien – Yggdrasil, a great ash tree, stood at the centre of the world. In its roots, the worlds of men and giants were to be found. Even though they were great seafarers who briefly colonized North America, there was no room for the Globe in the Viking imagination. As late as the thirteenth century, the Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241) began a history with the Old Norse words meaning the ‘the world disc’, which gives the saga its modern name Heimskringla. 

The reason Tolkien made Middle-earth flat in its earliest incarnation may have been recognition that this is how all peoples once saw their world. The sundering of the Undying Lands and Middle-earth represented a loss of innocence that shut humanity off from the spiritual realm. Yet Tolkien came to regret this aspect of his mythos. In a lecture in 1939, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien had discussed the importance of ‘secondary belief ’ and the rules that fantasy novels had to follow to achieve verisimilitude. He came to regard the flat Earth as failing the test because it was ‘astronomically absurd’. Unfortunately, it was too late to change such an integral part of the story of the Silmarillion, which might be why he never completed it. C. S. Lewis reveled in including absurdities in his tales (such as a lamp post in Narnia and an appearance by Father Christmas). Tolkien could not abide them.

This article Why Tolkien and C.S. Lewis explored the flat-Earth “absurdity” is featured on Big Think.

In November 2021, linguists from around the world met in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the seventh edition of a conference focusing specifically on the “R” sound. The conference, called ‘R-Atics, included a presentation on the intrusive R used in the Falkland Islands, a reconstruction of what R sounded like in historical Armenian, and a discussion of the R sounds in Shiwiar, an indigenous Ecuadorian language spoken by well under 10,000 people, among other events and talks. Don’t be too surprised if, at a future ‘R-Atics conference, the “crispy R” joins the ranks of esoteric presentations from linguists obsessed with the weirdness and variation of this particular sound.

The crispy R is a phenomenon that some linguists had noticed, but which had gone largely unstudied—until the phrase “crispy R” was bestowed on it by Brian Michael Firkus, better known as Trixie Mattel, the winner of the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, and later popularized via TikTok. The sound is easier to point out than it is to either describe or reproduce. Some of the most frequent users of this unusual-sounding R include Kourtney Kardashian, Max Greenfield of New Girl fame, Stassi from Vanderpump Rules, and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. It sounds, to me at least, like a sort of elongated, curled sound, a laconic way of saying R.

Here, just watch this video.

To figure out what’s going on with this linguistic quirk, I pored over spectrograms of a podcast I like, ranking various spoken words on their degree of crispiness. I silently mouthed the word “crispy” over and over during interviews with several linguists who, I have to say, were at least as interested and enthusiastic about the crispy R as Katya (Brian Joseph McCook, Firkus’s frequent collaborator and cohost), who literally screams several times upon hearing the sound.

The linguists were careful to note that any conclusions about the crispy R at this stage are still preliminary. They’ll have to do more listening surveys, more spectrograms, and ideally capture one of these rare natural crispy R speakers and try to get an ultrasound of the way their tongues move inside their mouths. But to understand their explanation, we first need to explain what a weird, distinctive, unusual thing the R sound is.

The R sound is indeed fascinating enough to be worthy of its own conference. It was the subject of a seminal study in 1966 by the godfather of sociolinguistics, Bill Labov. This involved talking to salespeople at Manhattan department stores that catered to different socioeconomic groups, and getting them to say the phrase “fourth floor,” to see whether there was a connection between the ways they pronounce their R sounds and their social milieux.

Linguists use the word “rhoticity” to talk about the R sound on a very basic level. English is an especially ridiculous language in the way letters don’t always do what they appear to, and don’t even do that in any kind of consistent manner: Think about how utterly silly it is that “rough,” “cough,” “bough,” and “though” are all pronounced with different vowel sounds. A pretty substantial percentage of native English speakers are what’s called “non-rhotic,” meaning that in many situations, they pretend as if the letter isn’t even there. Speakers of many dialects of British English, Australian English, South African English, and a vanishing number of dialects of American English are non-rhotic.

In American English, that non-rhoticity was, from the colonial era up to the early 20th century, considered prestigious: It was associated with the wealthy port cities of the Northeast that had extensive contact with Europe. (Think of FDR’s “the only thing we have to feah is feah itself,” or basically anything JFK ever said.) Labov’s study documented the decline of that prestigious connection. Non-rhoticity vanished from the upper classes as the United States overtook England as a world power. You can learn an awful lot about people, culture, and politics by studying R, it turns out. Also, it’s really weird, and linguists love that.

You can learn an awful lot about people, culture, and politics by studying R.

Here’s an example: R isn’t really a consonant. It’s kind of a vowel, at least phonologically. From the perspective of how sounds are physically generated, consonants are made by constricting or closing some part of your mouth or throat. Sometimes that’s done by closing your lips (P), or by blocking the flow of air with your tongue and then suddenly releasing it (T), that kind of thing. Vowels, on the other hand, are made with basically an open tube, from your vibrating vocal cords through your throat and out of your mouth. You make different vowel sounds by moving your tongue and lips around, but the tube stays open. R, like some other “consonants,” such as W and Y, aren’t produced the way a K or B is. It’s produced like a vowel, at least in English.

The sounds indicated by many letters are pretty much the same across most languages. Take a nasal, such as M, which is basically the same in every language that has it. R is extremely not. The two most obvious examples are the rolled R in Spanish, its quicker cousin in Scottish English (called an alveolar flap, basically a single roll of the tongue that Spanish speakers do), and the French R (called a uvular R, a guttural sound also made in other central and northern European languages, but only sometimes in Québécois French). Aside from Spanish and Scottish, these variants have no relation to each other and are not produced in remotely the same way. But they’re all Rs.

I spoke to Tara McAllister, a linguist turned speech pathology researcher. “I got interested in R because while it’s linguistically interesting, and a lot of linguists study it, it’s also clinically interesting,” she says. “A lot of kids who are in speech therapy for a long time get stuck or plateau on it.” The R sound is often one of the last sounds that young speakers learn to make, and one of the most challenging; it’s why “baby talk” often includes swapping the difficult R for an easier W. (A widdle easiew, anyway.) McAllister works with ultrasound technology, which enables her to show kids, in real time, what their tongue is doing as they speak, and to help her coach them to make changes to produce the R sound.

For most sounds, that’s a pretty simple process, in theory if not in practice, but not for R—because it can be made in multiple completely different ways. When we learn how to speak, at least outside speech therapy, we aren’t taught tongue movements. Nobody says, “Hey, in order to make a ‘th’ sound, gently pinch your tongue between your slightly open teeth and then squeeze air out of your mouth as you sort of flick your tongue back inside your mouth.” We all generally, while very young, experiment with different ways of making noise: vibrating our vocal cords, changing the shape of our mouths and lips, toying around with airflow.

Typically, we all end up doing roughly the same thing; after all, to make, say, an M sound, you kind of have to follow certain steps (air through the nose, lips closed, vocal cords vibrating). But it’s not essential; the only thing that’s really important is that a listener will interpret the sound you’re making correctly.

R is unusual in that respect because in English there are two totally different ways to make the sound. They’re more like points in a spectrum, really. “There are as many ways to pronounce R as there are speakers,” says McAllister. But linguists generally talk about two main shapes: bunched and retroflex. Bunched is, as its name suggests, made with the tongue pulled back in the mouth, all folded and crammed in there. Retroflex is made with the tip of the tongue pointed upward. They’re completely different shapes, but somehow they both end up making an R sound.

It has generally been thought that a retroflex R and a bunched R can’t reliably be distinguished by the human ear. That’s not to say there’s no difference in the way they sound, but rather that the human ear is not very good at recognizing those differences. Luckily we’re no longer restricted to the clumsy appendage of the human ear! This turns out to be key to understanding what’s going on with the crispy R, and so we turn to the machines to reveal what our dumb ears and brains have trouble distinguishing.

To find out, I talked to Jeff Mielke, a phonologist at North Carolina State University and one of the premier experts on the American R. He did a spectrogram, which shows all the frequencies in human speech, for the TikTok videos of the crispy R. But those videos have an inherent problem: The speakers are imitating the crispy R, not naturally producing it. Are they making it in the same way as natural crispy R speakers or using some totally different way to create the audio qualities they hear?

When I heard the TikTok the first time, I immediately recognized the phenomenon being discussed. It was a sound I had heard before and taken note of as different. Revealing this unexpected talent—it turns out not everyone, including many of my friends and one linguist whom I played the video for—to Mielke meant that I was now a valuable resource in the early stages of crispy R research. He asked me to send him any clips I could think of featuring natural crispy R speakers. I sent him an episode of the very good podcast TrueAnon, whose two hosts, Liz Franczak and Brace Belden, both demonstrate the crispy R to varying degrees.

Some comments on the original TikTok suggested that what is being called the crispy R is actually just a retroflex R. McAllister mentioned that it’s very common to jump to a conclusion that any odd-sounding R might be retroflex rather than bunched; in fact, she suspected that her own daughter might be a retroflexer, and excitedly tested her out with the ultrasound. (Why have access to fun equipment if you’re not going to use it?) Turns out, as with most of the retroflex guessing, McAllister’s daughter was, as she put it, “the bunchiest buncher.”

This makes sense. From a study written by Mielke: “These different articulations are well known, as is the observation that the different configurations do not make a perceptible difference to the listener. That is, in contrast to many other linguistic variables, whether a person is bunching or retroflexing is not apparent just from listening.”

Studies are not really conclusive on this, but have over the years indicated that some people use bunched Rs for everything, some use retroflex Rs for everything, and some use both depending on the context. Aside from doing an ultrasound of tongue movement, which sounds very fun and like something I’d love to do at some point, there are ways to figure out whether an R is bunched or retroflex. Mielke walked me through a couple of spectrograms of TrueAnon cohost Franczak saying the word “crew.”

Speech sounds are like musical chords. The dominant sound we hear is the lowest-frequency tone—our ears are just better at picking that up—but then those sounds have cascading harmonics, higher notes that go alongside them. It’s a little like playing a note on a piano, but then adding another note, more softly, higher up, and then another and another. Eventually the human ear stops being able to hear the difference when a new harmonic is added, or the brain stops caring about those higher notes because they’re unlikely to affect meaning.

Linguists are universally very excited to hear about some weird new accent or linguistic quirk.

Each of those notes is called a formant, and the frequency of those formants reveals the difference between Rs. The first and second formants, the lowest, are what’s most important for the human ear. “When we talk about vowel formants, we often disregard the third and higher formants. But where they’re important is in talking about how R is different from other vowel-like sounds,” says Mielke. We can technically hear frequencies at those higher formant levels, but our brains just sort of ignore them. Studies have shown that it takes a lot of weird stuff happening in those formants for us to notice.

In a bunched R, the fourth and fifth formants are very close together. In a retroflex R, they’re much farther apart. It’s a giveaway, albeit one we can’t really process without technological help. But there’s more going on than that. For one thing, it’s not exclusive: Every crispy R seems to be retroflex, but not every retroflex R sounds audibly crispy.

So we have something peculiar: If we assume that crispy Rs are retroflex, how is it possible that I and others can differentiate them? The spectrograms suggest that we can, but we really shouldn’t be able to. And if we can tell the difference, why do not all retroflex Rs sound crispy?

One possible explanation shows up in the spectrogram. In the Rs that I rated as “crispiest,” they’re clumped with hard consonant sounds such as K and B. And in those cases, there’s a pretty substantial gap between the consonant and the R that follows, so “crew” sounds almost like “kuh-rew.” This is why, I think, Firkus decided on the term “crispy” to describe it. It’s not exactly evocative of a “crispy” sound (What would that even be? Like the sound of a knife running along the edge of a fresh loaf of sourdough?) but it’s useful—if you make crispy Rs, when you say the name of the phenomenon, you’ll be demonstrating it right there.

McAllister suggests that what might be happening is that, well, it’s not really about the R, but rather what the R does to a neighboring sound. A consonant such as K or B is called a “stop,” which means it is a sound that requires the cessation of noise. As you transition from that to an R sound—in a word like “crispy”—the shape of your tongue will change the path of the burst of air used for the combined sound. In “crispy,” according to this theory, it’s not the R that’s crispy. It’s the K.

(There’s another element: crispy Rs that allegedly appear at the end of words. I hear this in the way Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard pronounces the word “year” in this song. It’s unclear if this ending R is related to the other crispy R; more study is needed.)

An especially fun thing I’ve found about linguists over the years is that they are universally very excited to hear about some weird new accent or linguistic quirk. Both McAllister and Mielke immediately got to work as soon as I introduced them to the crispy R. They posted about it on social media, shared it with other linguists whose specialties and subspecialties might provide insight, made videos, isolated and analyzed audio clips. I didn’t ask them to do this stuff. They were just psyched to dig into something new.

It’s also pretty likely that, even if linguists come up with a more precise name for the phenomenon, it will be forever referred to in academic literature and conferences as “known in the wider population as the ‘crispy R.’” All from some TikToks.

This article Why R is the weirdest letter is featured on Big Think.

According to many linguists, the most difficult language in the world isn’t Mandarin or Basque or Hungarian or Xhosa, spoken in South Africa, but Navajo.

Concentrated in Arizona and New Mexico, the Navajo are one of the largest Native American groups in the United States. Consisting of up to 400,000 tribal members, they are thought to have originated from northwestern Canada and were forcibly moved to their present location by the federal government in the 1860s during the Long Walk. Traditional Navajo families live in circular mud-and-log homes called hogans, create intricate ceremonial paintings made of sand, and hold four-day runs (a ritual called kinaalda) to celebrate young girls turning into adult women.

Arguably, the most important aspect of Navajo culture is their language. Also known as Diné Bizaad (the “people’s language”), Navajo is similar to Apache, from which it separated between 1300 and 1525 AD. Both Navajo and Apache belong to a language family called Athabaskan, which, providing evidence for their geographic origin, is also spoken by native tribes in Yukon, Alaska, and British Columbia. As with other Native American languages, globalization and discrimination threaten Navajo’s survival. In 2017, the number of fluent speakers was estimated at 170,000, less than half of the tribe’s population.

Learning Navajo isn’t easy. Compared to other complicated but more widely spoken languages, like Korean or Arabic, there are limited resources available to non-speakers. Mastery of Navajo language also requires a level of familiarity with Navajo customs, something even some Indigenous people no longer have access to. 

That said, the most daunting aspect of learning Navajo is the language itself. Described by linguists Robert W. Young and William Morgan as a “hopeless maze of irregularities,” its unique grammar, syntax, and tonal pronunciation are so indecipherable to outsiders that, during the Second World War, the U.S. Marines used Navajo as a form of military code.

Learning Navajo

Even listening to Navajo can be intimidating. Like other languages in the Athabaskan family, Navajo is tonal, meaning that words with the exact same spelling have different meanings depending on the way they are pronounced. Navajo not only distinguishes between long and short vowels (bita’ means “in the middle of” while bitaa’ means “[his] father”), but also between pitches, of which there are four different kinds: high (i.e., áá), low (aa), rising (áa), and falling (aá). Athabaskan is the only Amerindian language family to rely so much on tones, meaning that Navajo is as confusing to a Cherokee person as it is to a white New Yorker.

Navajo also has a complex phenology, featuring sounds that don’t exist in many other languages. It counts 33 consonants, including affricates and fricatives, and 12 vowels. (By comparison, the English alphabet has 21 and 5, respectively). Some of the trickier vowels include ę, a mid-front, short, nasal vowel, and ǫ́ǫ́, a mid-back, long vowel, also nasal. In addition to familiar consonants such as m and n, Navajo uses ł, pronounced by placing the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth and exhaling past both sides, and zh or ʒ, pronounced by bringing the tip of the tongue close to the roof of the mouth and exhaling onto the center.

“It’s hard to teach my tongue to say the different vowel sounds and symbols,” an Indigenous student from Arizona State University, one of the few schools in the country that teaches Navajo at undergraduate and graduate levels, told their school newspaper. “You need to interact with others to know that you are saying it right.”

Next up is grammar. Like Spanish, Navajo is a verb-centric language in which syntax centers on actions, and single verbs can convey as much information as entire sentences in English. Aspiring speakers better enjoy conjugating, as Navajo has more than seven different forms (English has five), 12 aspects (English has four), and 10 sub-aspects, all of which combine to form a dizzying number of outcomes. As the language-learning YouTuber xiaomanyc explains in one of his videos, Navajo verbs change depending on how a certain action is performed. For example, násh’ááh means to handle something once, while yish’ááh means to handle something repeatedly. If a certain action involves an object, the corresponding verb will also change depending on the nature of that object. The verb “to give,” for instance, changes depending on whether you are giving a compact object, a long and flexible object, a long and rigid object, a flat object, or a container. If you want to ask someone to give you a glass of water, you’ll first have to check whether the glass is empty, full, or half full.

Finally, there’s the concept of animacy. Existing in various forms in languages throughout the world, it is a semantic feature that expresses the sentience of nouns. In Navajo, nouns can be ranked from animate to inanimate, moving from so-called speakers (humans) to callers (plants, animals) to objects and, finally, abstractions. More consequential than gender, animacy not only influences spelling but also determines a noun’s position in a sentence, with sentient nouns coming before non-sentient ones, and animate before inanimate.

A dying language

For several decades, scholars have been keenly aware of the fact that Navajo is dying. “Although the Navajo is the largest Native American language group in North America,” anthropologist Bernard Spolsky states in a survey from 2002, researchers characterize it as “seriously endangered, ‘a major American tragedy’ that it seems ‘people don’t want to know about or talk about.’” In 1970, Spolsky writes, 90% of Navajo children in boarding schools spoke fluent Navajo, but no English. “By 1990 the situation had virtually reversed, with six-year-old Navajo children beginning Head Start or kindergarten suspected to have little if any knowledge of the language of their people.”

Native American Studies professor Tiffany S. Lee confirms, writing:

“When I was a middle school student in the interior region of the Navajo Nation in the early 1980s, all my peers’ first language was Navajo. Their choice in school at that time was to speak Navajo among themselves and with Navajo teachers. When I became a high school teacher on the reservation some fifteen years later, my students mostly spoke English with one another. Even if they spoke Navajo well, their language of choice in school was English.”

Reasons for the decline of Navajo mostly fall into three categories: historical, economic, and sociocultural. Historically, American schooling and religious institutions have forced Native American students to assimilate into Western culture at the cost of losing touch with their own. Economically, mastery of English offers more opportunity in an English-speaking world, while the utility of Navajo continues to shrink.

Finally, there’s the sociocultural component. Despite increasing efforts to promote the Navajo language in schools and through federal programs, younger generations are making a conscious decision not to speak their native tongue. Speaking with teenagers, Lee found several explanations for this phenomenon. Some refuse to speak to Navajo because they have been teased, and hope that hiding their Native American identity will decrease the discrimination they face in daily life. Others aren’t so much ashamed of their culture but, because of the way that Native American education in the U.S. has been set up, associate English with school and work. Last but not least, teenagers who have fully assimilated into Anglo-American society tend to think that Navajo is outdated and prefer to speak English instead.

Saving the Navajo language is easier said than done, as this not only requires the implementation of bilingual schooling but also, as the above responses show, a reconsideration of the way Native American children perceive themselves in relation to their white peers, and vice versa. Fortunately, both are happening. Limited educational programs, like those at ASU, are making Navajo more accessible to aspiring speakers. On the national level, a slowly changing political climate is generating widespread interest in and appreciation for Native American culture.

Most hopeful of all: while the number of Navajo speakers may be going down, the number of tribe members is increasing, rising from 300,000 in 2020 to over 390,000 in 2021. Perhaps the Navajo language will follow suit. 

This article Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn is featured on Big Think.

In 2023, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam launched the biggest exhibit in its 200-year history. Simply titled “Vermeer,” it brought together 28 of the 37 known works by the renowned 17th-century artist Johannes Vermeer, known for iconic paintings like The Milkmaid and Girl With the Pearl Earring, both of which were included.

The exhibit, which drew in a record-breaking 650,000 visitors during the first month alone, was guaranteed to become a financial success. Vermeer is one of the most famous painters of all time, a status resting not just on his style — serene depictions of Dutch Golden Age citizens inside their spacious, richly decorated households — but also his tragic backstory. His short life confined to the six or so street corners that made up the humble town of Delft, Vermeer died broke and forgotten. Sidelined by contemporary but arguably inferior artists, many of his paintings — he is thought to have made at least 60 — were lost to time, with the remaining 37 ending up in different museums in different countries, where they remained until their 2023 reunion.

The hysteria surrounding the Rijksmuseum exhibit is a testament to the enduring popularity of Golden Age art, both inside and outside the Netherlands. Asked about the reasons for this enduring popularity in the Western world, specifically the U.S., Benjamin Moser, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author of The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, considers their obviously innate quality, as well as their place within the history of American nation building.

“The U.S. has multiple origin stories,” he explains over Zoom. “The one that I was taught growing up in Texas was the story of the New England Pilgrims and the colonies they founded. But there’s another origin story, that of New York, which was originally called New Amsterdam. During periods of anti-British sentiment in America, of which there have been many, people turned to the Netherlands, and the fact that the biggest, most influential city in the country was of Dutch origin. As such, there was an impetus to see and collect Golden Age paintings as an expression of patriotic sentiment.”

Sharing in this fascination, Moser immigrated to the Netherlands in 2002 and never left. Speaking from his home away from home — a big-windowed 17th-century house in the city of Utrecht, the kind you could find in a Vermeer — he discusses the trials and tribulations of the move. Struggling to understand Dutch culture, which is far more alien to him than the nation builders let on, he visited the country’s many museums in search of answers. Although the old masters on display didn’t teach him all that much about their 21st-century descendants, they did help him dispel some lasting misconceptions about their life and work.

Dutch art is not as “realistic” as it appears

The Dutch are notorious for their unapologetic directness, a quality some critics have projected onto their most cherished paintings. In her seminal 1983 text, The Art of Describing, Svetlana Alpers argued Golden Age art was, first and foremost, descriptive. Where other cultures from the time produced art that told a story or communicated a message, the Dutch preferred scenes from ordinary, everyday life: families at the dinner table, soldiers patrolling the city, a woman pouring milk into her jug — images that, even if they do possess a deeper meaning, should really be taken at face value.

This interpretation treats Golden Age art as the early modern equivalent of photographs, relatively reliable accounts of what life in the Dutch Republic was really like. It’s an appealing hypothesis, especially for those interested in Dutch history, but it’s not a particularly accurate one.

“It’s one of the tricks the Dutch pull on us,” Moser explains. “Because these paintings show a house or regular people walking down the street, doing relatable things, and do not show an angel or Zeus on top of Mount Olympus or any of those fantastical scenes you’d find in Italy or France, people think it’s reality. They think: ‘Oh, that’s how Holland looked, and that’s how the Dutch looked.’ But the more you look into it, the more you realize that it’s — not fake — but invented, in the way a novel or a song is invented. It’s a human creation.”

Even if Dutch artists shied away from the fantastical, they still saturated their seemingly mundane subjects with disguised symbolism. They filled their paintings with fruit, animals, instruments — objects that, while natural and appropriate for the domestic settings of genre painting, also possess a double meaning which, if grasped, completely alter a work’s overall impression. At a glance, Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance appears to be just that: a woman holding a balance, yet the painting hanging in the background, of the Last Judgment, inevitably imbues this private and ambiguous scene with biblical importance.

In The Upside-Down World, Moser makes a similar observation about Vermeer’s one-time neighbor, Pieter de Hooch. Visiting a de Hooch exhibit in the U.S., it’s tempting to regard the well-kept, opulent households of his paintings as a convincing depiction of the affluent Dutch Republic. “That,” Moser remembers thinking, “is the place to live.” It wasn’t until he actually moved to the Netherlands, and settled into a historical building of his own, that he began to realize just how artificial the vision of the old masters actually was. As he wrote for The Nation:

“At first [living in the Netherlands] was this fantasy. In later years, the light started to fade. The reality of Dutch life — dreary weather, a bursting in-box, reptilian politicians on television — muscled its way in. It made me forget the silvery light falling through latticed windows onto the blue-and-white ceramics that reminded me of Vermeer. The place became a bit too ordinary, a bit too pedestrian. I remembered Pieter de Hooch.”

Dutch paintings were more than luxury products

Every critic looks at Golden Age art from a different perspective. For a long time, leading scholars examined the evolution of Dutch art in relation to the politics and economics of the Dutch Republic. Artists’ interest in public life was explained by their country’s rejection of monarchy, as well as its religious tolerance, while the sheer size of the Dutch art market was linked to the rise of a middle class obsessed with wealth and status. Golden Age paintings, in short, were paintings of luxury, as well as luxuries in and of themselves.

Although the prosperity of the Republic undoubtedly had an impact on art history, this kind of materialist interpretation diminishes the significance of other, equally important factors, including the artist’s authorial intent. Moser’s book devotes much of its length to artist biographies, to the unique and at times terrible experiences that may have guided their brushwork. Also of interest to Moser is geography: the immediate environment in which artists lived and worked. The tranquility and serenity that characterize Vermeer’s art mirror the small scale of his native Delft. With Rembrandt, who spent most of his adult life in Amsterdam, it’s the opposite. Moser explains:

“Rembrandt’s Amsterdam was a Big Apple, a place of immigrants, bankers, and artists. It was a dynamic, ambitious place. On the top of the Royal Palace Amsterdam, a humongous building, is a statue of Atlas holding up the world: an aggressive statement of Amsterdam as the center of the Earth. That sentiment you also see in Rembrandt, someone who had an incredible hunger for fame and achievement.”

Dutch art as a study of humanity

If the art of the Golden Age reflected the culture of the Dutch Republic, it no longer serves as an accurate representation of the society that has taken its place today. Indeed, the Netherlands Moser encountered at the turn of the Millennium was completely different from the one that has been preserved in museums. While still a wealthy and powerful nation, the ambition of the Republic has long given way to complacency, even a certain kind of narrow-mindedness. Though still highly diverse and multicultural, its historical tolerance and openness have been swept aside by new waves of xenophobia.

Moser has accepted his fate as an outsider. “I was much happier when I stopped trying to assimilate,” Moser admits. “I’m not from here, I’m never going to be from here, it’s not my language, not my people.” So the Pulitzer-prize winner does not look at the old masters in the hope of better understanding his contemporary Dutch neighbors. Instead, his Upside-Down World reads as an attempt to isolate Golden Age art from culture, to identify aspects of the old masters that transcend national boundaries and speak to our shared humanity.

Golden Age art, Moser concludes, is about “how to live, how to look at stuff, how to get up in the morning and live in a world with so much hatred and anger and beauty.”

This article A Pulitzer Prize-winning critic dispels common myths about Dutch Golden Age art is featured on Big Think.

For months, conservators at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco were hard at work fashioning a display case for Six Persimmons, the 13th-century ink painting at the center of their upcoming exhibit, “The Heart of Zen.” Its owner, the Kyoto National Museum in Japan, had provided the conservators with an extensive list of requirements concerning not just the material and measurements of the case itself, but the quality of the air inside it.

Even to seasoned museum workers, the demands of the Kyoto team appear extreme, bordering on unreasonable. That is, until you consider the history of the art involved. Painted on a scroll by the famed Chinese monk Muqi, Six Persimmons is as fragile as it is coveted. For centuries, this minimalist still life of autumn fruit was owned by a wealthy Japanese family that only displayed it during their exclusive tea ceremonies. After ending up in the hands of Daitoku-ji, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, it was moved to the National Museum — not to be displayed, but stored. “Heart of Zen” not only marks the first time Muqi’s masterpiece will be shown to the public since 2019, when it was exhibited at the Miho Museum, but also the first time it will be shown outside Japan.

The reasons for the painting’s coveted status are manifold. Although age and inaccessibility are part of the equation, those aspects pale in comparison to its status as a peerless illustration of Zen Buddhist philosophy. Created by an individual who is thought to have reached Enlightenment, Western and Japanese critics alike praise Six Persimmons for helping viewers find inner peace with its soft colors and quiet composition.

It’s an enticing and popular interpretation, and yet — as the San Francisco exhibit hopes to show — it may not be as historically accurate as many think.

The secrets of Zen Buddhism

Despite becoming one of the most famous Chinese painters of all time, Muqi struggled to find success in his home country. Born during the final days of the Southern Song dynasty, the monk’s idiosyncratic style — calligraphic renderings of mundane subjects like food, trees, and animals — clashed with the tastes of the Song, who preferred complex and representational art rich in worldly symbolism. The qualities that made Muqi an iconoclast in the eyes of fellow Chinese were received as forward-thinking in neighboring Japan, where his work would inspire painters for centuries.  

Glancing at Six Persimmons, it’s difficult not to think about Zen Buddhism. Born in China but cultivated in Japan, it rejects the study of ancient, esoteric scripture in favor of meditation. According to Zen Buddhists, Enlightenment was a product of unflinching introspection, not devotion to rites and rituals. By depicting a fruit that, in Chinese culture, was devoid of connotations, Six Persimmons forces the viewer to appreciate the subject for what it is, rather than the ideas it could represent. The result is a painting that cannot be analyzed, only experienced — the same way one interacts with rolling clouds or flowing water.

The persimmons, abstract in form and painted without shadows, float inside a depthless void. Yuki Morishima, an assistant curator at the Asian Art Museum who helped prepare the “Heart of Zen” exhibit and had been able to see Six Persimmons only once before in Japan, says she was as impressed with the painting’s negative space as she was with the positive space, with the actual persimmons. Her reaction evokes the Zen concept of groundlessness, which calls for the need to accept life’s inherent unpredictability.

If Muqi’s persimmons possess any symbolism, they are symbolic in the broadest sense of the word. The fruits themselves represent impermanence and the search for nirvana. Just as Enlightenment arrives after a lifetime of meditation, so do persimmons ripen in the fall, the season of death and decay. If preserved, their soft, sour flesh can be turned into a hard, sweet candy, mirroring the way a Zen Buddhist transforms suffering into serenity.

Six Persimmons: an aesthetic or a way of life?

A closer look at Muqi’s critical reception indicates that his current reputation as an enlightened artist is a misconception. Originally, Morishima tells Big Think, Six Persimmons was treated as little more than decoration. Its first owners, Japan’s Tsuda family, displayed it at their ceremonies not to prompt some kind of spiritual discussion, but because its subject matter matched the type of food they would have served their guests.

In a 2021 article from the Korean Journal of Art History, South Korean art historian Heeyeun Kang explains how Six Persimmons acquired its present-day significance. Arriving in Japan along with Zen Buddhism itself, Muqi only started to become recognized as an explicitly Buddhist painter when the Japanese elite decided to establish Zen as an explicit aspect of Japanese identity.

Spearheading this push for reidentification, Japanese critics like Okakura Tenshin, Aimi Kōu, and Awakawa Yasuichi likened Six Persimmons to the crucifixes found inside Christian churches — icons that seek to convey through visuals what the New Testament expresses with words. When Zen Buddhism started gaining popularity in the West, a popularity that endures to this day, European and American writers accepted this new and highly marketable interpretation of Muqi’s work without a second thought.

Although Six Persimmons may not be the intentional Buddhist masterpiece many believe it is, this doesn’t mean the painting is any less impressive as a work of art. An optical counterpart to poetry, Muqi’s simplistic brushwork evokes emotions that are anything but simple. Standing in front of the scroll has a similar effect as meditating or opening the Calm app on your smartphone.

The longer you look, the more the struggles and anxieties of ordinary life begin to fade away, leaving only beauty, contentment, and a strong awareness of being. Just being.

This article Ancient Buddhist painting can help you understand the art of Zen is featured on Big Think.

Being human, the vast majority of authors choose to write books about human beings. However, narratives need not unfold from the perspective of a person in order to convey interesting ideas and leave an impact on the reader. The more unusual an author’s viewpoint, the more creative possibilities present themselves during the writing process.

A good example of this is The Secret Life of Objects by Dawn Raffel. As its title suggests, this 2012 collection of short stories is written from the perspective of various inanimate things, including a button, a cake pan, and a shoelace that together bear witness to the lives of the humans that own and use them. Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Dicks is, as you might have guessed, written from the perspective of an imaginary friend — specifically, one that lives inside the mind of a young autistic boy. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is narrated by a personification of death, traveling through Nazi Germany. There are even some books “written” by God, one of which — The Last Testament: A Memoir by David Javerbaum — is framed as an autobiography.

When written well, an unusual viewpoint allows the author to explore a theme or communicate a message. Surpassing more conventionally written narratives, books revolving around non-human characters allow readers to see the world in a new light. At times, they may even teach us valuable lessons about what being human really means.

Leo Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer”

In his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky explains how he analyzes a work of literature. Where so many others turn to history, psychology, or an author’s personal biography to make sense of what they read, Shklovsky believed that texts should be allowed to speak for themselves and be observed in isolation from the world that exists outside their pages.

This means focusing only on what’s inside a book: its structure, metaphor, diction, and syntax. It also means looking for something Shklovsky termed “defamiliarization” or “estrangement.” Defined as an effect that every author should strive to produce, to defamiliarize is to make the familiar appear unfamiliar again — that is, to describe something, like an action or emotion, in such a way that the reader feels as though they are encountering it for the first time.

To further illustrate his point, Shklovsky turns to a little known story by Leo Tolstoy called “Kholstomer.” Far removed from celebrated works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, it follows the life of a work horse as it is moved from one Russian estate to another. The fact that Kholstomer is a horse is not a trivial detail, as its limited perspective and inability to reason allows the animal to identify prejudices and injustices in society that any human protagonist would overlook.

Reynaert the Fox versus Animal Farm

During the Middle Ages, authors used animal characters to satirize real-life individuals and institutions. In his 1250 story Of Reynaert the Fox, the Middle Dutch poet named “Willem die Madoc maecte” (“Willem who told tales”) replaces the nobility and clergy of his day with wolves, bears, and hares — all of whom are given their due by a clever fox that, through his pranks, punishes the evils of feudalism. Had Willem written Reynaert the Human, and mentioned his targets by their actual names, he might have lost his hands — or worse, his head.

Animal satire continued all the way into the 20th century. In his famous 1954 novella Animal Farm, essayist George Orwell substitutes the Soviet government for a farm and the Soviet people with farm animals. By doing so, the author somehow makes his critique more digestible and sophisticated at the same time. The czar is represented by a human farmer named Mr. Jones who, after years of abuse and neglect, is chased away by his own animals. The white pig leading the charge, Snowball, stands in for the intellectualism and idealism that drove the 1917 Russian Revolution, while the black pig Napoleon, who takes over the farm after hunting down Snowball, is a personification of Joseph Stalin.

But Orwell’s critique goes deeper still. The fact that Snowball and Napoleon are both pigs suggests to the reader that the things they embody — the two Russian Revolutions of 1917 and their resulting forms of government — are, to some extent, connected. Also portrayed as a pig is the philosopher Karl Marx who, in the form of an aging porker called Old Major, encourages his fellow animals to stand up against Mr. Jones. Last but not least, the guard dogs Napoleon uses to seize power symbolize the Soviet secret police as well as, arguably, the Communist Party’s most devoted followers. Just as Napoleon raised the dogs since they were pups, so did an entire generation of Russians grow up under Bolshevik rule.

All Tomorrows and West of Eden

While some non-human protagonists are supposed to remind readers of their own humanity, and how it can show up in places they least expect it, other authors delight in creating narratives that, through their unusual perspectives, feel genuinely alien. Such is often the case for narratives written from the viewpoint of extraterrestrials, like C.M. Kösemen’s science fiction classic All Tomorrows, in which an omnipotent alien race, the Qu, uses genetic engineering to devolve humanity into dozens of otherworldly lifeforms.

Some of the most “alien” characters in fiction aren’t aliens at all, but dinosaurs. In West of Eden (not to be confused with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden), the author Harry Harrison envisions an alternative universe in which the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction event misses the Earth, allowing dinosaurs to survive and eventually develop sentience. The civilization created by this new species, called the Yilanè, is nothing like our own, and Harrison goes into lengthy detail explaining how the differences in social organization relate to their unique biology and evolutionary history.

The Yilanè evolved from a small marine reptile related to the fearsome mosasaurs. Over the course of their evolution, they returned to living on land, learned to walk upright, and grew opposable thumbs to enable them to manipulate their environment more easily. The basic organization of Yilanè life begins with their language, which consists not just of sounds but also of gestures made with their limbs and tails, as well as with their skin, which like a chameleon’s changes color to reflect their mood. Because this process is unconscious and uncontrollable, the Yilanè lack the ability to lie to one another. Because male Yilanè die after reproducing, society is matriarchal, with the males being raised in segregated communities until they are old enough to breed. Rigid social norms keep their society homogenous — a homogeneity further enforced by biology, as a vestigial hormonal mechanism in their hypothalamus once used for hibernation will cause any Yilanè that becomes physically separated from their community to die.

This article 5 classic books where the main character isn’t human is featured on Big Think.

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is a pillar of the Western literary canon. A whirlwind tour of the nine circles of hell, the allegorical poem has had volumes of scholarship dedicated to unpacking its secrets. Its vivid, and often grotesque, imagery has inspired artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Auguste Rodin, and William Blake. It was even made into a video game.

Alighieri’s other two poems of The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio and Paradiso, explore the realms of purgatory and heaven, respectively. But they don’t receive the love, attention, and adoration of the hell-bound original. That’s because heaven is — let’s face it — a little one note. Hell is where the drama happens.

Given its prominence in imagery and storytelling, it is surprising that hell doesn’t appear much in the Bible. In fact, most of its references to Satan’s scorching domain are the result of later translators mapping their views onto older, and quite distinct, concepts of the afterlife. This means hell as we understand it today is an afterlife the biblical writers had no real conception of.

Where in the hell?

Sheol is mentioned 66 times in the Hebrew Bible, and many versions of the Old Testament translate the word as hell. For example, the King James Bible renders Psalms 16:10 as “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.”

The exact meaning and etymology of the word Sheol is debatable. Some biblical scholars argue it is a synonym for the grave itself. Under this view, a more accurate translation of Psalms 16:10 might be: “For you will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your Holy One to rot in the grave.” Other scholars disagree and argue Sheol is a realm of the dead (see Job 10:21). Even then, Sheol is a far cry from hell. Rather than a realm designed to punish sinners, Sheol is a place where all souls congregate and exist in listless nothingness. There is no pain or suffering, but neither is there joy or celebration.

If not the Hebrew Bible, then surely hell is discussed at length in the New Testament? But even in the New Testament, references to hell are sparse. Jesus, Christianity’s central figure, and Saint Paul, its founding missionary, did preach about existential comeuppance. But in our earliest Christian writings — Paul’s epistles and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew — neither warned of a hellfire awaiting sinners.

Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman argues that a close reading of Jesus’ words shows this. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus preaches about the impending “Kingdom of God,” and by that, he didn’t mean a kingdom in heaven. Jesus envisioned a kingdom here on earth and that those who followed God’s laws would be bodily resurrected to live in this glorious new era. He believed it was coming soon, too — within a generation (Matthew 24:34).

The fate befalling those who turned their backs on God wouldn’t be an eternal sentence. They would simply be annihilated. Many of Jesus’ parables warn of this. The bad fish are discarded (Matthew 13:48). The trees that bear bad fruit are thrown into the fire (Matthew 7:16-20). The same happens to those dastardly goats separated from the holy sheep (Matthew 25).

While many of these parables evoke the image of fire, Ehrman points out that these fires destroy the unfaithful. Even if the fires burn eternally, those cast within aren’t said to. Their punishment is death in the face of eternal life.

“This appears to have been the teaching of both Paul and Jesus. But it was eventually changed by later Christians, who came to affirm not only eternal joy for the saints but eternal torment for the sinners, creating the irony that throughout the ages most Christians have believed in a hell that did not exist for either of the founders of Christianity,” Ehrman writes in Heaven and Hell.

Highway to hell

If not the Bible, then where did hell come from? The simple answer to that complex question — this is a “brief history” after all — is that hell is a collaborative effort of cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean region.

Jewish culture didn’t materialize in a vacuum. The neighboring — and, on more than one occasion, conquering — empires influenced it. Sometimes Jewish thinkers would adopt and adapt ideas from these cultures. Other times, they would reject them. But both changed Jewish theology over centuries. 

For instance, Jewish apocalypticism viewed the world as a cosmic battleground between good and evil. As the view went, God’s enemies held dominion over the current era, but soon, God would conquer his enemies and usher in a utopian era. And apocalyptic thinkers were greatly influenced by Hellenistic culture after the conquests of Alexander the Great. This is evident in how they combined their biblical traditions with Greek motifs such as heavenly journeys and judgment of the dead.

“These Hellenistic parallels do not argue that the apocalyptic genre is derived from Hellenistic culture or that the Jewish apocalypses lack their own originality and integrity,” John Collins, an Old Testament scholar, writes. However, “the Hellenistic world furnishes some of the codes that are used in the apocalypses.”

Jesus’ worldview was steeped in apocalypticism, and in a strange twist, Saint Paul brought Jesus’ brand back to the Hellenistic world through his ministry. There, it mixed and mingled further with Greco-Roman concepts of the afterlife. 

As the generations passed and Jesus’ promised Kingdom of God never materialized, these newly minted Christians got to thinking: What if they had misunderstood Jesus? What if the triumph of good over evil didn’t happen on Earth? What if the eternal life promised was in the spiritual sense, something along the lines of other idyllic afterlives? And if there are to be eternal rewards, then it isn’t much of a leap to think that the punishments must be eternal, too.

A place of agony

This evolution of Jesus’ message is seen in the later written books of the New Testament. Second Peter tells of how God cast the sinful angels into Tartarus (again, often mistranslated as hell). In the Rich Man and Lazarus — a parable that appears only in the Gospel of Luke — the rich man is said to suffer in Hades after death, while the saintly Lazarus enjoys an afterlife in Abraham’s bosom. (Heaven, it seems, was a work-in-progress at this time, too.)

Once conceived of, hell quickly took on an afterlife of its own. One of the earliest tours of hell is the Apocalypse of Peter. Written in the 2nd century, it tells of Saint Peter’s travels through the afterlife. The description of heaven is short and not very eventful; rather, it is in Peter’s hellscape that we recognize our modern conceptions taking shape.

Here, sinners are tormented according to their earthly misdeeds. Blasphemers are hung by their tongues. Murderers are bitten ceaselessly by venomous snakes and flesh-eating worms. Rich misers wear rags and are pierced by a pillar of fire. It’s display after display in a cruel shop of horrors, one that would make most modern readers queasy.

“The author of Peter had a voyeuristic, sadistic, and scatological bent that set the tone for later visions,” Alice Turner writes in The History of Hell. “Though we may recoil from Peter and regret its wide influence, it may be useful to know that at the time it was written the threat of torture was a new anxiety for Christian citizens [of Rome].”

Not one hell of a place, but many

That may seem like the end of the journey into hell, but like the fires fueling this inferno, hell just won’t stand still. Since the early Christians, each era of Western culture has refashioned hell in some way. Oftentimes, the changes are more a statement about their world than the next:

• The Middle Ages witnessed a smorgasbord of hells in popular stories and theater. Hell may be horrible, but at the time, it was certainly livelier than most people’s daily existence. 
• Dante’s hell was, among other things, a proclamation against the Catholic Church’s wealth and involvement in politics. 
• During the Baroque period, Jesuits retired hell’s more fiery tortures and reimagined them in terms of crowded urban squalor.
• By the Enlightenment, the very idea of hell was questioned. Voltaire proclaimed it ridiculous that a man should burn forever for stealing a goat (while also noting the connection between hell and Persian, Greek, and Egyptian afterlives).

All of which is to say: Hell is not a singular concept handed down to us from the Bible. It has many permutations, with each one serving as a spiritual placeholder for the best and worst of us.

On the one hand, it shows our desire for justice. If life will not play fair, then we can at least imagine an afterlife where the wicked and treacherous pay for their crimes, while their victims receive relief from earthly torments. On the other hand, hell houses our hate, intolerance, and savagery. It puts on full display our hidden desire to be proven superior over others — and to punish those who don’t conform to our beliefs.

This article A brief history of hell is featured on Big Think.

“Worms will crawl over your face! Ghosts will roam the aisles!” Dr. Silkini warns as the Frankenstein monster slowly comes to life onstage, “If the lights go out, stay in your seats!” Suddenly possessed by a fit of rage, the monster strangles the hunchbacked assistant and charges into the audience with a roar. As the front row squeals in anticipation, there is a blinding flash, and the lights suddenly go off.

Pandemonium erupts in the pitch black theater. There are screams, macabre laughter, wild howling. Glowing skulls appear and disappear. Something slimy slaps your head and slithers over your face. You furiously bat away what indeed feels like worms. A strange luminous form floats overhead. On the stage, a kick-line of skeletons dance and then fly apart. The little boy next to you turns, and his face glows in the dark.

A moment later, the logo for Universal Pictures flickers to life on the movie screen. Everyone giggles with relief as they settle back to watch a cheesy horror film.

The original release poster of the 1975 cult film, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” / Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation / Wikimedia Commons

A campy interactive horror show with a mad scientist? No, this isn’t The Rocky Horror Picture Show—though it is related. This is Dr. Silkini’s Asylum of Horrors, one of the many midnight spook shows that were ubiquitous in America from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Now all but forgotten, spook shows were a “winning trifecta of spooky-themed magic shows, ghost blackout segments, and fright films, presented in lavish motion picture houses,” according to Mark Harris, author of Ghostmasters, the definitive study on spook shows. The interactive performances were shown in movie theaters usually at midnight.

Dr. Neff’s spook show played at a theater in St. Louis, Missouri in 1945. (MONSTERSFORSALE/FLICKR)

Though they were popular in the mid-1900s, spook shows—and Rocky Horror itself—have roots in 1800s séances. A steady, spooky line throughout history shows how Victorian séances were incorporated into magic shows, which were then taken to the movie theaters as spook shows, where live performances were paired with horror films, which led to the audience-interactive Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s a long, rewarding journey through time, with many spirits and monsters along the way.

If you enjoy jumping out of your seat to dance the Time Warp, you can thank Maggie and Kate Fox. In 1848, the Fox sisters convinced their neighbors that they were in contact with a spirit who was making strange knocking sounds. Within a few years, they had sparked a cult movement. Thousands of people flocked to séances where mediums manifested progressively flashy phenomena that purported to indicate the presence of the dead. Tables turned, furniture floated in the air, and mysterious messages appeared on slates.

Magicians at the time had mixed reactions to the popularity of séances. Harry Houdini famously led a crusade against psychic mediums, announcing in the Los Angeles Times, “It takes a flim-flammer to catch a flim-flammer.” Other magicians, among them Thurston and Harry Kellar, began to incorporate ghostly elements into their conjuring repertoire. “By 1896, there was hardly an illusionist in Europe or America who was not including at least one spiritualistic séance as part of his act,” notes historian Mervyn Heard in Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern.

One magician named Elwin-Charles Peck was the first to bring the performance to movie theaters. In 1929, Peck (whose stage moniker was El-Wyn) approached a theater and asked if he could put on a magic show after the last screening. Vaudeville was on the wane by then, and there were fewer venues in which magicians could perform. Meanwhile, movies were rising to dominate popular entertainment. Peck’s idea to pair a spooky magic show with a supernatural picture show at midnight was a stroke of entrepreneurial genius. He became the first spook-show operator or ghostmaster.

Calling his production “El-Wyn’s Midnite Spook Party”, Peck took spiritualism in a devilish new direction. Yes, messages appeared on slates and tables floated in the air, but Peck did away with the dramatic sob fest connecting a grief-stricken mourner with their dearly departed (the part that most invited scrutiny). Instead, El-Wyn’s Midnite Spook Party played the séance for cheap thrills and jump scares. Peck’s coup de grâce was a climactic blackout in which he pelted the audience with three minutes of supernatural effects in the dark.

El-Wyn’s Midnite Spook Party was a smash hit, and he was soon selling out midnight shows throughout the country. Other magicians began presenting their own spooky magic shows in tandem with midnight movies. They also copied Peck’s blackout finale, complete with glowing skulls and flying cheesecloth dipped in luminous paint. When the ghostmasters mentioned falling spiders and worms, assistants dropped popcorn on audiences and dangled damp mop strings on people’s faces. A new theatrical form was born, made out of huckster showmanship and the band-new wonders of glow-in-the-dark paint. By the mid-1930s, numerous spook shows were touring the United States, proliferating in concurrence with the rise of horror films.

The spectacular success of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931 established Universal Pictures as the foremost producer of horror films and officially launched the horror genre. Other studios began cranking out gothic films to cash in on the fad. The accompanying spook shows were as goth as the films they preceded, with ghostmasters presenting supernatural illusions in Victorian drawing room settings. As the horror genre became more sci-fi in the 1940s, ghostmasters morphed into mad doctors in lightning-filled labs and the spook show became a monster show.

Ghostmasters continued to develop creative stunts throughout the 1950s. Kara Kum’s outrageously gory shows featured decapitation, cannibalism, and the materialization of James Dean. Asylum of Horrorsby Dr. Silkini was more like a horror-themed carnival sideshow featuring Frankenstein’s monster. At the other end of the spectrum was the consummate Madhouse of Mystery, renowned for its astonishing blackout sequence, after which illusionist Bill Neff would wish the audience “pleasant nightmares.” Other successful spookers include Zombie Jamboree by Ray-Mond, notorious for a bloody scene in which a team of mad doctors operate on a hapless volunteer from the audience.

Spook shows also capitalized on Hollywood fandom. Glenn Strange, who played Frankenstein’s monster in three Universal films, toured as the monster in Don Brando’s Tomb of Terror in 1947. Bela Lugosi, who rocketed to fame as Dracula, donned his cape and fangs in Bill Neff’s midnight show. Lugosi later helmed his own spook shows when movie roles dried up.

The popularity of spook shows started to wane with the rise of television. People began staying home for their entertainment, especially after TV started offering midnight programs that mimicked spook shows. The first of these was The Vampira Show in 1954. While there is no way to drop spiders through a TV screen, Vampira roughly followed the spook show format by amusing her audience with eerie antics before introducing a campy horror film. In 1957, Screen Gems began showing classic horror films in a late-night television show called Shock Theater. Again emulating spook shows, the program was hosted by ghouls, mad doctors, and Eastern European nobility.

Still, spook shows did continue in movie theaters, though they were beginning to look a little passé paired with the darker horror films of the 1960s. In response, spook shows amped up the sex and violence. Scantily-clad ghostesses paraded their hex appeal onstage. Assistants were brutally decapitated. Though audiences were shrinking, the zero-budget spoof Monsters Crash the Pajama Party was specifically produced in 1965 to be used in a spook show. Part way through the movie, a gorilla crashes out of the frame as the film goes black. At the same time, a spook show assistant in a gorilla suit is meant to pop out and kidnap an actress planted in the audience wearing a white dress. When the film resumes, a woman in the same dress is dragged into the lab to be tortured.

By the 1970s, horror had become too serious, bloody, and dark for spook shows. Jump scares just didn’t fit with The Exorcist and Carrie. By then, magicians had also found it too cost prohibitive to mount a proper blackout sequence. But while the spook show disappeared, the precedent for midnight movie screenings remained—and headed underground. “A distinctive strain of subterranean moviegoing had developed, after hours and under wraps,” wrote J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum in Midnight Movies.

The counterculture scene from the 1960s through the ‘70s came with an explosion of underground films, played at clubs and niche cinemas. Midnight was reserved for the most outlandish films. In New York, the Elgin Theater became known for turning subversive films into cult hits through midnight screenings, starting with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1970 and continuing with John Water’s Pink Flamingos and The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff.

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” / Wikimedia Commons

And then The Rocky Horror Picture Show came along. With campy horror a relic of the 1950s, no one anticipated just how big the film would become. Rocky Horror started out as a musical play performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1973. It was hugely successful and went on to more theaters before being adapted into a movie. But when the film was released in a few test market cities in 1975, reviews were dismal and the national release was canceled.

Everyone was ready to shelve the film except for Tim Deegan, the 26-year-old publicist assigned to the film by 20th Century Fox. Hoping to emulate the success of Pink Flamingos, he secured a midnight run at the Waverly Theater in New York City in 1976. Within a few weeks, a group of rowdy fans—emboldened by the gay rights movements of the time—began regularly attending and interacting with the film, which celebrates both a self-proclaimed “transvestite from Transylvania” and every schlocky horror trope.

The cult classic took off. Audiences began flocking to movie theaters at midnight to interact with performers dressed up as characters from the film while the movie played on the big screen. This time, rather than following instructions from a ghostmaster or magician, audiences came up with their own thrills, throwing toast and rice on cue or squirting water guns during certain scenes.

Today, Rocky Horror is the longest running film in history, playing at a movie theater somewhere in the world every night for nearly fifty years, often accompanied by live performers, costumes, choreographed dance moves, and stunts. Little do many fans know that in addition to paying homage to the science fiction double bills of yesteryear, they are also channeling the raucous spirit of midnight spook shows. With a mad scientist, gory death scenes, cannibalism, and rowdy audience interaction, it seems all that’s missing is the blackout and luminous paint—and maybe some floating furniture.

This article The Rocky Horror Picture Show has surprising roots in Victorian seances is featured on Big Think.

A cursory glance through any Zoomer’s chat history or social media DMs will reveal images of various fruits, vegetables, and animals used in lieu of regular written communication. Many of these “emojis” are used as sexual metaphors today, a practice that isn’t new by any means. The first use of representations of produce for this purpose dates back to the late Renaissance in Rome. How did this trend, which corresponds with contemporary sociological practices, become popular in the first place?

Artist and writer John Varriano answers this question in an article published in Gastronomica in 2005.

Varriano writes that the initial growth of this artistic style took place in the era that began with Raphael (1483–1520) and ended with Caravaggio (1571–1610). Subjects from the “natural world and from daily life” appeared to catch the imagination of visual artists in particular in the sixteenth century. A humorous genre that “fashioned clever visual puns from ordinary foodstuffs” emerged from this interest. Varriano points out that “Renaissance ‘learned erotica,’ as opposed to popular pornography, was especially steeped in metaphors, puns, and elaborate rhetorical devices.” And the shapes of certain fruits and vegetables lent themselves especially well to sexual suggestion.

One reason for this assertion of the anthropomorphic nature of fruits and vegetables goes back to the “doctrine of signatures,” which had been advocated for centuries by “herbalists searching for signs to the efficacy of God’s creations.” Varriano writes that the epicenter of this relationship between food and sex was in papal Rome because of its largely male population. A number of painters, including Raphael and Caravaggio, inserted figs, peaches, melons, and squashes into their paintings, even when they depicted religious scenes.

The first example of this can be seen in the frescoes painted in the Loggia di Psyche at the famed Italian Villa Chigi, now known as the Villa Farnesina, a popular museum of contemporary Italian art. Giovanni da Udine, one of the artists in Raphael’s circle who worked on the frescoes at the villa, inserted “suggestive depictions of fruits and vegetables” into the paintings. According to biographer Giorgio Vasari,

Above the flying figure of Mercury, [Giovanni da Udine] fashioned a Priapus from a gourd and two eggplants for testicles…while nearby he painted a cluster of large figs, one of which, overripe and bursting open, is penetrated by the gourd.

Friulan artist Niccolò Frangipane, in his painting Allegory of Autumn, offers is a prominent example of this type of symbolism. Frangipane’s work isn’t subtle, explains Varriano. The painting features a “leering satyr pok[ing] a finger into a split melon…his other hand grasps a sausage that lies near a cluster of cherries, his gestures vividly evoking the erotic dreams of the youth napping next to him.” In another painting attributed to Frangipane, often referred to as Satire on a Madrigal Performance or The Madrigal Singers, the artist mocks “the refinement of music by arranging the singers around a table suggestively festooned with peaches and sausages.”

Varriano shares the example taken from a tapestry known as The Meeting of Joseph and His Father (Incontro di Giuseppe). Commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici as part of a larger series to decorate the Palazzo Vecchio and designed by Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino, the focal point of the tapestry is the central image, which shows a poignant reunion. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the tapestry’s ornamental border includes “phallic bottle gourds cavorting with abandon.”

This practice of slipping fruit and veg into an artwork to up the sexual tension wasn’t limited to the visual arts, Varriano writes. Poets and writers also began to connect the “congruities of food and sex” through the use of “bawdy poems keyed to sexually suggestive crops.” Some of this imagery was effusive in its portrayal of homoeroticism, with a number of examples highlighting “the sixteenth century’s fascination with the penis,” in Varriano’s words.

It’s not all humor and wit, though. Botanists also accredit these works with offering a unique and detailed perspective on the “horticulture of the time replete with identifiable insect predations and disease damage,” writes Varriano.

Though the practice of symbolizing sex with produce seems to have waned in popularity after 1600 in Rome, Dutch and Flemish painters took it up in later years. But Varriano points out that the genre, with its “off-color wit,” would still have functioned as a fantastic metaphor for the culture of post-Reformation Rome, “a culture whose quest for religious and political orthodoxy frequently led to further uncertainties, and where humor alone offered an acceptable outlet for transgressive desire.”

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In the fall of 1888, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was walking to his guesthouse in the Italian town of Turin when he felt the corners of his mouth twist upward as though they were being pulled. “My face was making continual grimaces in order to try to control my extreme pleasure,” he later wrote in a letter to a friend, “including, for 10 minutes, the grimace of tears.”

Unfortunately for Nietzsche, then 44 years old, these uncontrollable fits of laughter proved the beginning of something serious. Over the following week, other members of the guesthouse noticed that the philosopher stayed in his room for days on end. Peeking inside, they would find the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra naked, playing on the piano, and dancing like a man possessed.

Nietzsche’s rapidly deteriorating mental state reached a literal breaking point when, in January 1889, he saw a horse being flogged in the town square. Shouting incoherently, he ran over to the scene and flung his arms around the animal before collapsing. Visiting a recovering Nietzsche later in the week, Franz Overbeck found his closest friend in a delusion from which “he never emerged again.” 

Overbeck noted that Nietzsche was “quite clear about who I and other people were [yet] in darkness about himself (…) Sometimes, in a whisper, he produced sentences of wonderful luminosity. But also uttered terrible things about himself as the successor of the now-dead God, the whole performance continually punctuated on the piano.”

Today Nietzsche’s mental breakdown, which led to his partial paralysis and – ultimately – early death, is as famous as his philosophy. Just as people wonder what drove the painter Vincent van Gogh to cut off his ear, so too do people wonder why Nietzsche lost his sanity. Was it the result of a physiological illness, or could an explanation be hidden somewhere in his celebrated texts?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s medical history

It is possible that Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown was caused by an underlying disease — but what kind? The first doctors to examine the ailing philosopher diagnosed him with a syphilis infection, which can lead to paralysis and even dementia. Subsequent studies proposed that Nietzsche may have suffered from a tumor on the right optic nerve of his brain, which would have produced similar issues.

While the precise biological cause of Nietzsche’s breakdown cannot be ascertained, it’s worth noting that the philosopher had a history of both physical and psychological illness. Ever since he was a child, Nietzsche suffered from nauseating migraines. At age 26, he also contracted dysentery, which he treated with chloral hydrate — a powerful sedative that causes hallucinations, convulsions, and heart problems.

Over the years, Nietzsche’s chronic pain took a toll on his well-being. “Every two or three months I spend about thirty-six hours in bed,” he once wrote in a letter, “in real torment (…) It is such a strain getting through the day that, by evening, there is no pleasure left in life and I really am surprised how difficult living is. It does not seem to be worth it, all this torment.”

The philosopher’s lack of success — he became famous only after his death — and lack of social contact also caused him stress. “It hurts me frightfully that in these fifteen years not one single person has ‘discovered’ me, has needed me, has loved me,” a letter reads. “How rarely a friendly voice reaches me!” another adds. “I’m now alone, absurdly alone.”

All these conditions, some of which Nietzsche believed he had inherited from his sickly father, convinced him that he would die an early, painful death. Several letters express a growing fear of one day going insane and losing himself in his labyrinthine mind: “…at times a premotion runs through my head that I am actually living a very dangerous life, since I am one of those machines that may explode.”

Creativity, intelligence, and mental illness

Although Nietzsche may have felt alone, his situation wasn’t entirely unique. Van Gogh, Robert Schumann, Amadeus Mozart, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Georgia O’Keefe, and Jackson Pollock — history has produced no shortage of highly creative individuals that, in addition to their artistic and intellectual achievements, lived with severe and at times debilitating psychological problems.

The tragic fates that have befallen so many of these “mad geniuses,” as their personality type is sometimes referred to in academic circles, have prompted extensive research into the correlation between creativity, intelligence, and psychopathology. It’s a correlation that, for all the attention it has received in recent years, remains as elusive as Nietzsche’s own medical diagnosis.

A number of studies have shown that creative people are twice as likely to suffer from conditions like depression and anxiety compared to the general population. At the same time, the rate and intensity of these symptoms vary depending on outlet or discipline, with poets and writers proving more likely to suffer from disorders than, for example, scientists.

While creativity and mental disorders might well be linked, it is wrong to assume — as so many books and movies do — that the latter somehow enhances the former. In fact, both scientific research and biographical evidence — Nietzsche’s case included — suggest the opposite: such disorders, alongside the alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal ideation they often cause, slowly grind a person’s productivity to a halt.

But while mental illness does not necessarily contribute to creativity, creative outlets might contribute to mental illness. This, at least, is what Otto Binswanger, the director of the mental hospital that briefly admitted Nietzsche, proposed. Talking with the philosopher’s mother, he suggested that the intellectual and emotional energy Nietzsche channeled into his work overstimulated his nervous system, effectively frying his brain.

The new God

Binswanger’s brain-frying hypothesis leads to the most interesting (and speculative) part of this discussion about Nietzsche’s breakdown: the possibility that his insanity wasn’t some biological accident, but a logical result of the philosophic ideas he had spent his life pursuing. Although the answers this question produces are by no means definitive (let alone verifiable), they certainly are thought-provoking.  

Anyone even remotely familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche knows that suffering plays an important role in his writing because it made him, as scholar Viviana Faschi puts it, “more acutely aware of his own existence.” For Nietzsche, pain preceded personal development and self-actualization. It also marks the origin of one of his most famous quotes: “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

The philosopher elaborates on this often misquoted line in his book The Gay Science, writing, “…as for sickness, are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? (…) Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time—on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood — compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust.”

Nietzsche’s journey of introspection and self-discovery — a perilous path if the likes of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are to be believed — was taken not out of curiosity, but necessity. By gazing into the abyss that lies inside the human brain, Nietzsche hoped to discover some kind of abstract wisdom — he referred to it as “the philosopher’s stone” — that would make his corporeal anguish bearable.

Knowing this, the aforementioned quote from his close friend Overbeck begins to make more sense already. Even in insanity, Nietzsche remained “quite clear” about his surroundings and the people who interacted with him. Instead, it was himself — his former self — that he had lost sight of and was “in darkness about.”

This article Did Friedrich Nietzsche’s own philosophy drive him insane? is featured on Big Think.

Was Rembrandt van Rijn a bad student? Birgit Boelens, a conservator at the Hermitage Amsterdam art museum and curator of the 2023 exhibit titled Rembrandt & His Contemporaries, hesitates. One would think that someone with Rembrandt’s innate talent must have been a bit of a rulebreaker, but this was not necessarily the case. “He certainly had a mind of his own,” Boelens says. “But above all, he was curious and eager to learn, and his teachers appreciated that.”

During the Dutch Golden Age, aspiring painters started their careers working as apprentices in the studios of established artists. From his teacher, Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt learned how to make history paintings. Combining portraiture, figure painting, architectural painting, and still life, this genre was long considered the pinnacle of artistic expression. As an apprentice, Rembrandt not only inherited Lastman’s affinity for creating grand, complex images but also his ability to imbue scenes from the past with a contemporary significance.

Just as Lastman’s David Gives Uriah a Letter for Joab (1619) treated the rivalry between the Israeli king and his general as a reflection of the deteriorating relationship between Maurice, Prince of Orange, and the (beheaded) grand pensionary Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, so does Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (1661), which depicts the ancient inhabitants of Holland rebelling against the Romans, mirror the Eighty Years’ War in which the Netherlands sought to liberate itself from the Spanish Empire.

The study of Rembrandt’s education dispels one of the biggest myths in art history. We tend to place iconic painters in a vacuum, picturing them painting in their studios or nature, removed from the outside world and its distractions. However, this could not be further from the truth. The art market in which Rembrandt operated was a tightly interwoven ecosystem, and exhibits like Rembrandt & His Contemporaries trace how stylistic influence pass from one generation of artists to the next.

Rembrandt studied under Lastman for only six months. Others trained for more than eight years. He was also only 22 when he opened his own studio with apprentices Gerrit Dou and Isaac de Jouderville, who paid him an annual fee of 100 guilders in exchange for his tutelage (the equivalent of $6,000 today). Dou and Jouderville made copies of Rembrandt’s works and even helped him with commissions. It’s been said that large parts of The Night Watch were painted by his pupils, with Rembrandt focusing on the design and the finish. Dou and Jouderville also learned how to mix paints — a complicated practice before the age of chemistry and art supply stores.

The paintings on display at the Amsterdam Hermitage reveal how strong an impact Rembrandt left on his apprentices. Boelens points towards Carel Fabritius, whose painting Hagar and the Angel (1645) could easily be mistaken for a Rembrandt. In the Bible, Hagar was a slave impregnated by Abraham, the father of Judaism, because his wife, Sara, couldn’t have children. When Sara found out, she sent Hagar and her newborn son Ishmael out into the desert. With Ishmael at death’s door, a weeping Hagar fell onto her knees to pray for his survival. Fabritius chose to depict this moment from the story, doing so with a sensitivity that rivals his master.

“It’s emotional, but not sentimental,” Boelens says. “Her despair is completely and utterly believable.”

Fabritius is widely recognized as the most gifted of Rembrandt’s apprentices, as well as the one who most closely followed his style. Unfortunately, Fabritius died in 1654 at the age of 32 when a gunpowder store exploded in the city of Delft. The explosion killed more than 100 people and injured thousands more. It not only took Fabritius’ life but also incinerated many of his paintings. Hagar and the Angel was preserved, but one wonders what its creator could have achieved had he lived even a little bit longer.

Rembrandt’s style evolved drastically throughout his career. Initially, the painter followed the Dutch tradition of Lastman and others, applying a painstaking finish to his work. In time, however, Rembrandt’s paintings increasingly came to resemble his sketches: loose, expressive, and borderline abstract. Brushstrokes, previously blended to the point they were hardly noticeable, were rapidly smeared across the canvas to reveal his process.

“Up close, it almost looks like Van Gogh,” Boelens notes of Bust of a Bearded Old Man (1633), a painting no larger than a playing card. Just as the eye assembles the checkered images of Impressionist paintings, so too do we turn Rembrandt’s patchwork of shape and color into a more precise, cohesive whole. “By doing so, we become participants in the artwork,” Boelens adds.

For a while, Rembrandt’s apprentices followed his example. In Aert de Gelder’s Christ on the Mount of Olives (1715), the last of Rembrandt’s pupils incorporated not just his trademark use of chiaroscuro – the stark contrast between light and dark, famously displayed by the lost girl in The Night Watch – but also the interpretive lack of detail characteristic of his late period. From a distance, Christ and the angel comforting him look like fully rendered figures. Up close, they recede into abstraction.

Not all of Rembrandt’s contemporaries were fond of this style. In Leiden, the painter’s birthplace, a new movement inspired by French art was slowly taking over the Netherlands. The Fijnschilders, or “fine-painters” as its followers were known, abandoned abstraction in favor of precision. They also traded subtlety and sensitivity in favor of elegance, bright colors, graceful gestures, and melodrama. As Rembrandt fell out of favor with buyers, pupils such as Ferdinand Bol jumped ship. Rembrandt & His Contemporaries contrasts Bol’s Angel Appearing to Elijah (1642), completed during the last leg of his apprenticeship, to his later painting Venus and Cupid (1658), which is closer to the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens than Rembrandt.

As his former students achieved fame and fortune, Rembrandt’s prospects declined. Once the undisputed king of Amsterdam’s art scene, his anachronistically abstract brushwork and increasing fascination with biblical imagery made it difficult to attract commissions. The death of his wife Saskia at age 29, most likely from tuberculosis, made the procrastinating painter even less productive than he already was. His financial situation became so dire that between 1657 and 1658, he was forced to sell his stately house in the center of Amsterdam. Moving into a smaller home in the suburbs, he died penniless in 1669.

Despite leaving the world financially ruined, Rembrandt had the last laugh. Today, his art, not Bol’s, Dou’s, or Jouderville’s, receives the most attention at museums and auction houses. His style, disliked by his contemporaries, is now recognized for what it was: ahead of its time.

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In September 1923, Alfred A. Knopf brought out a slim, hundred-odd page volume. The publisher did little to promote it, yet its first print run (some twelve hundred copies) sold out within a month—unheard-of for a poetry volume, then and now.

Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet was a slow but steadily growing burn, one that has continued, year on year, for ten decades.

Interspersing twenty-six short prose-poetic pieces with original illustrations, The Prophet has made Gibran the third-bestselling poet in history—behind Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. To date, The Prophet has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide (over 10 million in the United States alone) and has been translated into more than a hundred languages.

Yet The Prophet has always been and remains uniquely troublesome, and to call it the bestselling “poetry book” of its century might be misleading. Is it poetry? Or is it (in today’s language) Inspirational Fiction, wisdom text, a spiritual guide of New Age wellbeing or self-help? Perhaps (to deploy a paradox, Gibran’s favorite device) it is all these things and none of them.

Gibran wrote once of his desire “to write a book that heals the world.” The Prophet was that dream’s fruition. Yet his other work—eight English language collections and more books, poems, and other writings in his native Arabic—is largely ignored in the Anglosphere. The Prophet is thus a bestseller with an almost anonymous author. Gibran’s book has outlived him in more than one sense. Though it has had the kind of afterlife of which he himself can only have dreamed, there is in this a strange irony. Gibran was so successful in his likely aim—absorbed into the figure of “The Prophet,” imitating the unknown authors of scripture—that, for many readers and lovers of his book, he remains irrelevant.

It is a very different story in Arabic, where Gibran is held to be a crucial modern innovator, a transitional bridge between the conventions and strictures of a more classical tradition and a newer, freer, romantic sensibility. In Gibran’s case, the adage of the prophet without honor in his home country is inverted. In the West (where Gibran made his home and sought recognition) academic and “literary” opinion regards his concerns and their treatment as utterly anti-modern. He is, indeed, heretically retrograde: fancily faux-Biblical, extravagantly overwritten, vague, naïve, sentimental, and whole lot of other things, terms often directed in baffled rage at Gibran’s apparently undeserved popular appeal. The year 1923, after all, saw the debuts of Wallace Stevens and other modernist high priests in the United States and came hot on the heels of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses the year before. In his adopted tongue, at least, Gibran was an artist out of time.

He was born Gibrān Khalīl Gibrān bin Mikhā’īl bin Sa’ad, in 1883, in the mountain town of Bsharri in modern day Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Raised a Maronite Christian by tolerant parents in a country riven by religious and ethnic factionalism, Gibran’s mind was exposed early to a diversity of worldviews, and he wove them into his work. When he was twelve, he emigrated to Boston with his mother and siblings, leaving behind his father, who had become an increasingly violent drunkard. They lived in the immigrant districts of Boston’s South End, where Gibran went to public school with Chinese and other immigrant children.

Gibran was a dreamy, beautiful, and artistically talented boy, both in writing and drawing, and he came to the notice of other artists and social workers in the city. It was through admirers, for whom he was something of an “exotic,” that Gibran got his first exposure to Western and avant-garde arts: Wagner, Whitman, Nietzsche. He returned to Lebanon at fifteen for four years of schooling, then made his way back to Boston in 1902. In 1911, he moved into a small studio in New York where he stayed for the rest of his life, writing and drawing––and, increasingly, drinking––for long, late hours in what came to be known as his “hermitage.” Before that, in 1908, Gibran trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, and ultimately produced over 700 visual works in his lifetime, seeing himself in the same poet-artist lineage as his hero, William Blake––whose writings he called “so far the profoundest things done in English…the most godly.”

Gibran had published two English works—and more Arabic ones—before The Prophet, both also published by Knopf. They shared the same form of prose poems written in aphoristic, oracular style. Knopf himself did not particularly seek to market The Prophet, expressing bafflement at its success: “I haven’t met five people who ever read Gibran.” Each year, though, more copies sold. By 1938, with an American populace in need of spiritual guidance in the face of economic depression and political instability, the book sold over 100,000 copies. During the war, it was distributed to soldiers in a pocket-sized Armed Services Edition. By 1957, the book had sold a million American copies. The 60s were its apogee—at its height, 5000 copies were selling a week—and it became, in effect, a counterculture alternative to the Bible.

A sampling is enough to give a sense of Gibran’s register of language and address, as well as The Prophet’s (virtually non-existent) narrative. It opens:

Al-mustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.

Before the prophet’s departure, however, the townspeople gather to see him off. “A seeress” named Almitra requests:

Yet this we ask ere you leave us, that you speak to us and give us of your truth. And we will give it unto our children, and they unto their children, and it shall not perish.

And so, Al-mustafa obliges, each chapter being a sermon based on different questions about the basic and essential matters of human life: love, marriage, children, food, work, houses, business, law and order, beauty, education, faith, death. The tone of these lines—the grandiloquent epithets, some archaic diction, rarefied Biblical cadences replete with Biblical ‘Ands’ and Whitmanian deployment of repetition, both terse and ripe, and humorlessly sincere—give a good flavor of the whole. Alongside the Christian influence of his upbringing and the language of the King James Bible, Gibran drew on the Islamic tradition and Sufism that he had also observed in Lebanon, alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Blake, Nietzsche, Whitman, and the Transcendentalist, Romantic and Symbolist writers.

What, then, of this prophet’s philosophy? It will certainly read differently for different people, but there are a few clear threads that read as very modern indeed, for good reason. Gibran played a hardly insignificant role in shepherding us toward the contemporary miasma of “spirituality without religion.” What he managed, for many readers, was to write the sacred text for modern values, which is sometimes a suspicion of all values in and of themselves.

In Al-mustafa’s teaching, the real and essential “truths” as to how we should live our lives cannot, in fact be taught. This is the essential, and characteristically paradoxical, teaching of The Prophet. The prophet we seek tells us that we do not need him.

“The teacher,” Gibran writes, “does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” It seems a strange message for a book of apparent wisdom, and yet it is one entirely fitted for the twentieth century reader (justifiably) full of doubts about the nature of authority—and not merely of the religious sort. From his teachings on the nature of children (“Your children are not your children…And though they are with you yet they belong not to you”) to the nature of love (“All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart”) the same refrain recurs: that truth comes only from within.

If all this sounds woo-woo, vague and mystical, it’s because it probably is—but only in the same way that Gibran’s inspirations were too. The message—that everything also contains the elements of its opposite, and that oneself is both irreducibly alone and inconceivably part of a larger whole, that we do not learn, but mysteriously “discover” our inner selves—may be obvious or meaningless depending on one’s sensibility. It is also, for many, a profoundly, mysteriously, bafflingly true fact about the experience of living. Such simple and bottomless truths are so hard to express that they can seem obvious—and so become clichés upon utterance. Gibran’s book is one such attempt to express and revivify these truths. Whether he succeeds or not is subjective, but (to follow the number one rule of criticism) he ought not be criticized for not writing the sort of work he was not attempting to write.

Perhaps a way to see The Prophet afresh today is instead to reverse the trend of killing Gibran the author from his work, and to bring him properly to the picture. Many accuse him of pandering to an America that was spiritually exhausted, curious, hungry for rejuvenation with “Oriental” spiritualities, but still wanted flattering and to be spoken of in ways it could understand. As the Arabic literature scholar Nadeem Naimy, nephew of Gibran’s friend Mikhail Naimy, writes: “To be an emigrant is to be an alien. But to be an emigrant mystical poet is to be thrice alienated.” If his book is read as the work of a Lebanese Christian from a majority Muslim nation, struggling to free itself from a crumbling empire, living in an adopted country where he would forever be seen in one or another form as other, we can begin to place it in more solid ground.

The othering of the young Kahlil by enthusiastic artistic circles in Boston, and later New York, in which he was treated by many as “the prophet” avant la lettre, must have left some complex imprints on him. On the one hand, he clearly internalized the philosopher-poet-priest image such patrons projected onto him. It became an inseparable part of his identity, his sense of artistic calling. On the other, this strangely self-observant, self-consciously “Eastern mystic” image is likely to have further complicated his relationship to his Arabic and Lebanese heritage. “I’m a false alarm,” he told a friend—disavowing, for once, his own grandiosity. His end, precipitated by alcoholism, speaks to this inner malaise. He died at 48 in 1931, of cirrhosis among other complaints.

Yet the tortured attempt to speak across culture, resolving a crisis of identity in universal terms is still meaningful. It will only become more so as migration and intercultural confusions become the inescapable human trends of a warming century. Two contemporary readers of Gibran, the actress Salma Hayek, who produced an animated feature of The Prophet in 2015, and the doyenne of Instapoets Rupi Kaur, who wrote a foreword for The Prophet’s 2019 Penguin edition, both likened encountering the work to a wisdom-filled conversation with their grandfathers—from Lebanon in Hayek’s case, and in Kaur’s, India.

Indeed, the success of popular poets, like Kaur, on Instagram and elsewhere in what Global modern literature and media scholar Aarthi Vadde dubs “the digital literary sphere” is equivalent to the word of mouth success of The Prophet, independent of the literary establishment. This is not to mention the many successful novelistic careers launched via web publishing and self-publishing ventures—including, now, Tik Tok. As Vadde points out: “If the novelists strive to entertain, the poets aim to inspire. Each group builds massive followings that operate entirely outside the professional literary circles that dictate prestige.” Kaur’s work is shared and spread, by millions, freely. It proves that there is more than one way for poetry to mean. In his early, democratic virality, Gibran certainly proved prophetic.

Gibran’s poetry lives publicly in a way poetry largely ceased to do in the West throughout the twentieth century. His verses on love and marriage have been vows at weddings for the “spiritual but not religious;” read as solace by the incarcerated; recited at Mandela’s funeral. It must also be one of the most oft-given books in the world, presented both in times of celebration and sorrow.

There is no doubt that Gibran is a godfather of the “New Age,” and that it was his sincere—if grandiose—wish “to write a book that heals the world.” What is often sought in “inspirational” texts, whether the Gospel of John or The Secret, is not “inspiration” so much as authority—something that will bolster or expose what was already within us by the affirming voice of an “other.” As a text, this is what The Prophet is essentially about. As the poet himself put it, “No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story failed to indicate that Lebanon, a majority Muslim country, has long also been home to other large religious communities. It also erroneously suggested that The Prophet was the only poetry collection released in a pocket-sized Armed Services Edition.

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In 1855, the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy published three short stories based on his experiences in the Crimean War, known collectively as the Sevastopol Sketches. Like many Russian noblemen, Tolstoy spent his adolescent years in the military and — like many — couldn’t wait to get his first taste of battle. Unfortunately, the reality of war was nothing like it had been described in myths, speeches, and history books. Expecting glory and valor, Tolstoy found only death and destruction. In his sketches, he reflects on the overwhelming stench of rotting corpses, the dull and lifeless look in the eyes of wounded soldiers, and the disorganized state of both the Russian and Ottoman armies.

Today, the Sevastopol Sketches are widely recognized as an early example of anti-war literature: a genre of stories that refutes traditional, more positive representations of war. Although rare before Tolstoy’s time, anti-war literature became more common after the First World War thanks to novels like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

A similar pro-to-anti-war trajectory can be found in the realm of visual art. Famous paintings like Diego Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (1635), Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), and Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) are, in essence, illustrations of the viewpoint Tolstoy wanted to debunk. By crafting heroic displays of clashing militias and larger-than-life portraits of the generals leading them, artists throughout history helped to reinforce the notion that war is noble, justified, and synonymous with providence and progress.

But just as some writers started to accurately describe the horrors of war in their stories, so did painters begin experimenting with ways to depict them in visual art. Interestingly, where the former relied on realism, the latter turned toward abstraction. This is perhaps because the painter’s goal wasn’t to show what battles looked like — a task that had been relegated to photography as early as the American Civil War — but, rather, to communicate what fighting in one felt like.

Below are four famous paintings that were particularly successful in this endeavor.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

The most famous and radical of the famous paintings on this list, Guernica is inspired by — and named after — the 1937 bombing of a town in the Basque Country in northern Spain. The bombing, which the Basque government says killed as many as 1,654 people, was carried out by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who hoped to wipe out the Republican rebels located there.

Commissioned by the Spanish Republican government for the Paris International Exposition in 1937, Guernica is Picasso’s first work that makes a political as opposed to merely an aesthetic statement. Previously concerned with redefining what can and cannot be considered art, the artist uses abstraction to highlight the senselessness of this ideologically motivated attack. “The painting,” writes one critic, “does not render either a realistic or documentary account of the bombardment but rather alludes, by means of tonality, motifs, and both cubist and surreal stylistic devices, to the horrifying chaos made possible by modern technological warfare. [It] is symbolic, and the utterance has a universal, even cosmic, dimension.”

Joining the painting’s more recognizable figures — a woman falling from a house, a mother and child locked in embrace — are two of Picasso’s favorite symbols: the horse and the bull. If his earlier paintings depicting bullfights offer any guidance, the animals represent two sides of humanity: the horse being the feminine victim of the bull, and the bull, half removed from the scene and half part of it, being the male aggressor. Asked if the latter symbolized fascism, Picasso answered, in characteristically opaque terms, “brutality and darkness, yes, but not fascism.”

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) by Salvador Dalí

Another painting of the Spanish Civil War, Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans predates Guernica by a short year. Created before the conflict started, the always-eccentric surrealist claimed that the “prophetic power of his subconscious mind” had seen it coming. Although many art historians suspect Dalí changed the name of the painting retrospectively to enhance its appeal, it remains a striking image.

Like Picasso, Dalí used gendered symbols and bizarre imagery to express his attitude toward the conflict. The painting, in line with most of Dalí’s work, is as difficult to describe as it is to forget. A grinning, humanoid figure stands in front of what website dalipaintings.com describes as a “sunbaked” landscape. Precariously balanced and ripping itself apart, the figure — a mess of limbs without a torso to connect them — is an obvious allegory for the state of Spain. “The scattered beans of the title,” the website states, “exemplify the bizarre incongruities of scale to conjure the workings of an unconscious mind.”

Described by Dalí as a “delirium of autostrangulation,” Soft Construction with Boiled Beans takes less of a metaphorical and more of a psychoanalytical approach to the Spanish Civil War. Psychoanalysis and surrealism — the genre of painting to which Dalí subscribed and which he now epitomizes — go together like Tolstoy and Russia. Both the psychoanalyst and the surrealist seek to understand the waking world through the seemingly absurd but actually quite sensible construction of dreams. In the painting, Dalí pays homage to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, with a small portrait hidden in the corner of the frame. More obvious are the many breasts and penises emerging from the possibly climaxing figure. Comparable in meaning to the bull and horse in Guernica, they suggest that the Spanish Civil War was an act of sexual perversion.

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya

Yet another painting from Spain, this time from a different historical period. The Third of May 1808 — considered, with the possible exception of his infamous “black paintings,” to be Goya’s masterpiece — depicts the aftermath of a failed uprising against the French occupation of Spain, which began a year earlier when Napoleon Bonaparte replaced King Charles IV with the former’s own brother, Joseph.

On May 2, 1808, street fights erupted in Madrid after French soldiers opened fire on crowds protesting in front of the city’s royal palace. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and placed in front of a firing squad the following day. Goya’s striking composition reveals his thoughts on the event: The French executioners, their backs turned towards the viewer, are almost machinelike in their conduct. Our focus (and sympathy) is aimed at the poor rebels, one of whom spreads his arms to imitate Christ on the cross.

This unambiguous picture serves as an entry into Goya’s surprisingly complex worldview. Although understanding of the rebels, the painter had long criticized Spanish society under the rule of Charles IV and his despotic son Ferdinand VII. At the same time, he was harboring a not-so-secret love for “enlightened” rulers like Napoleon. The Third of May 1808 was painted more than six years after the executions took place and was commissioned by Ferdinand, presumably to challenge Goya about his allegiances during the occupation. Consequently, the painting’s most striking feature — the moral contrast between the righteous Spaniards and the heartless Frenchman — may actually be the result of the painter trying to escape persecution, rather than expressing his unfiltered feelings.

The Corpses of the Brothers De Witt by Jan de Baen

In Dutch history, 1672 is known as the Rampjaar, or “Disaster Year.” This is because, in April, the Republic of the Netherlands went to war with — and was ultimately defeated by — a joint alliance involving England, France, and the bishoprics of Munster and Cologne. With the end of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age in sight, citizens of the Hague unloaded their anger on the Republic’s Grand Pensionary, Johan De Witt, who along with his brother Cornelis was brutally lynched not far from his own office.  

A 1672–1675 painting attributed to Dutch artist Jan de Baen shows what was left of the brothers after the mob had dispersed: They were stripped naked, strung from a wooden post (Johan slightly higher than the older but less powerful Cornelis), castrated, and disemboweled. Faithfully following eyewitness accounts, De Baen painted the brothers without fingers or toes (these were cut off and sold as souvenirs) and even added the remains of a cat one rioter was said to have stuffed inside Cornelis’ body.

Occasionally compared to studies of butchered animals like Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1655 Slaughtered Ox, The Corpses of the Brothers De Witt is perhaps more akin to a form of historical documentation. Like some of the early etchings it was based on, it has appeared in texts old and new to illustrate something so gruesome words cannot describe. Art historian Frans Grijzenhout, writing in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, went as far as to argue the painting “could be interpreted as some kind of inverse political double portrait,” a commemoration of the De Witts’ career and the terrible fate awaiting them at its end.

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We are going through an age of genius – not in that we have lots of them, but in that we are obsessed with them. Books about geniuses fly off the shelves, and the internet drowns in articles about “How to Be a Genius” or “The Habits of Successful Geniuses.” And, mea culpa, we all play our part.

When it comes to the sciences, the word “genius” is fairly well understood. We can understand it in terms of paradigm shifts and the creative destruction that tears down the old ways and reestablishes a better one. But what does it mean to be an artistic genius? What qualities do exceptional musicians, authors, photographers, or filmmakers need?

The problem is that when we talk about the arts, we often use the word “talented.” But “talented” has now become so overused that it’s lost most of its value. Worse than that is to say, “They’re a talented artist” — it feels so limp as to damn a person with faint praise. In response, we have resorted to hyperbole: “They’re a genius,” “a revolutionary,” or a “genre-busting heir to Shakespeare.” The English language has little to offer between the words “talented” and “genius.”

So, what is the difference between the two, and how can we make sense of “geniuses” in the arts?

Express what you can conceive

We can all become talented at something. Talent is defined by hard work, repetition, and deliberate, directed effort. You might be talented at your work because you’ve done so every day for the last ten years. To be talented, then, is to do well at a certain thing. It is no different in the arts. A talented artist is an accomplished — perhaps exceptional — person in their field. They can write, paint, or sing better than most people.

Talent is about the practice of the art itself. It is producing creative work within a certain art form really well. For the essayist William Hazlitt, one example of an artist we might call talented (Hazlitt prefers the term “ordinary” genius) is the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth takes what he knows — the feelings, thoughts, and observations of a poet — and turns them into brilliant art. The poet, as Hazlitt wrote, “may repose on his own being, that he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it, that he may unfold the precious stores of a mind.” In other words, talented artists like Wordsworth work on what they know. They have an experience or story they want to tell, and they tell it well.

The reason this is “ordinary” genius or just talent is that it is egoistic. The talented artist is “self-involved… [and] sits in the center of his own being.” They bring themselves to the world, evoke feelings, or transport us to faraway lands, but with their eyes. They project their experiences onto us. The extent to which we relate to talented artists depends on how far those feelings resonate. Wordsworth wrote about love — as universal a feeling as any — so most people can enjoy his message today. If he wrote about saddle sores while riding on his estate in November, it would resonate less.

The power of conception

The difference between talent and genius is that the artistic genius can express feelings that are beyond their own experiences. They have such an exceptional capacity for empathy and imagination that they can enter into and vividly paint worlds that are foreign to them, or conjure artistic works that are unlike anything ever seen or heard before. For Hazlitt, one man stands out: “Shakespeare (almost alone) seems to be a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius.”

Shakespeare could express the horrors of war, the nadir of grief, and the throes of love in a single play. He could represent the common man and the aristocrat, country life and city life, and England and abroad. As far as we know, he did all this from his relatively unexciting life and a house in Stratford-Upon-Avon. As Hazlitt put it, “He was the Proteus of human intellect.”

Artistic genius is not so much about the art itself or the act of singing, writing, designing, and so on. It’s the ability to see things beyond your corner of the world or things no one else has seen at all. As Susanne Langer wrote, “Talent is a special ability to express what you can conceive, but genius is the power of conception.”

The underrated value of the talented

None of this is to devalue the talented. By Hazlitt’s (and most scholars’) definition, a vanishingly few numbers of people can be geniuses — one an age, perhaps. I doubt anyone reading this is an artistic genius. We ought to reclaim the word “talented” for being the badge of pride that it ought to be. Indeed, Hazlitt even believed that hardworking, resourceful, and diligent “ordinary” geniuses are worth more than an unrestrained, unfiltered genius.

Artists, especially talented artists, are those who put in the hours. They work hard at what they’re doing. As Philip Pullman puts it, “Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?”

Talented people work hard, and that, always and everywhere, deserves praise and respect.

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As any horror film fan can attest, the bathroom can be a scary place. From Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scene in Psycho to the blood-spewing drain pipes of Stephen King’s It, there’s no shortage of genuinely startling imagery connected to lavatories. But when it comes to conjuring up the most terrifying possible interruptions to our most private moments, no one beats Japan.

In Japanese folklore, there are a number of spirits rumored to appear in bathrooms. Some reach out from the insides of toilets; others whisper through the stall walls. Each one has its own grim story and particular behavior, but they all share a connection to the bathroom.

“The bathroom is a somewhat unusual space in a household or school or wherever it exists,” says Michael Dylan Foster, author of The Book of Yôkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. Foster describes bathrooms as liminal spaces in that they connect the normal, everyday world to a whole different realm, namely the sewer.

“In that sense, the bathroom is a place of transition, and the toilet in particular is a portal to a mysterious otherworld,” says Foster. “Even though we generally flush things down, it would not seem surprising for something mysterious to come up through the toilet.” A hand reaching up through the toilet is just one of the possible creep-outs a Japanese bathroom ghost might visit on someone.

Toire no Hanako-san

One of the best-known of Japan’s bathroom spirits is Toire no Hanako-san, or Hanako of the Toilet. Like all ghost stories, the details of Hanako’s origins vary somewhat from telling to telling, but in general, Hanako is said to be the ghost of a young girl who died around WWII, and now haunts school bathrooms. Usually described as wearing an out-of-fashion red dress and bob haircut, she can be summoned by going to the girl’s bathroom on the third floor, knocking on the third stall three times, and saying, “Are you there Hanako-san?” Depending on regional variations, Hanako will respond by saying, “Yes I am,” or a ghostly hand will appear. If someone enters the stall, they could also be eaten by a three-headed lizard.

The last outcome notwithstanding, Hanako is generally just a spooky presence meant for a good scare. Hanako has appeared in numerous anime series and television shows, and is pretty much a star. “[The legend] is well known because it is essentially an ‘urban legend’ associated with schools all over Japan. Since the 1990s, it has also been used in movies, so it became part of popular culture not just orally transmitted or local folklore,” says Foster.

Kashima Reiko

Hanako is not the only young girl said to haunt the bathrooms of Japan. There is another legend of a young girl named Kashima Reiko, said to be the ghost of a girl who died when her legs were severed by a train. Her legless torso now haunts bathroom stalls, asking unlucky visitors, “Where are my legs?” The correct response, “On the Meishin Expressway,” could save your life. Otherwise, it’s said that she might tear a person’s legs off.

Kashima Reiko is a bathroom-centric variation of another Japanese ghost story known as “Teke Teke,” which also features the ghost of a young girl who was cut in half by a train. There’s also a version of the Kashima Reiko story that suggests she will appear within one month to anyone who learns her story. This set-up probably sounds familiar to anyone who knows the popular Ring franchise, which Foster compares to the liminal aspect that makes bathrooms so ripe a setting for horror. “[Note] the classic J-horror film (and book) Ringu, in which Sadako is in a well; the association of the well as a mysterious place has precedents in earlier Japanese folklore. Also if we think about the imagery of Sadako coming out of a television set, we get the same idea that the television is a portal to another world; she literally crawls from another world into our own.”

Aka Manto

It’s not all scary little girls. One of the most gruesome of Japan’s bathroom ghosts is Aka Manto, or the Red Cape. Also sometimes called Aoi Manto (Blue Cape), or in some variations, Akai-Kami-Aoi-Kami (Red Paper, Blue Paper), this modern spirit is said to resemble a person completely covered by a flowing cape and hood, wearing a mask that hides an irresistibly handsome face. He is said to appear to people (usually in the last stall) as they are going to wipe, asking a strange question. Sometimes the spirit asks, “Red cape or blue cape?” or offers “Red paper or blue paper?” Choosing red will lead to Aka Manto flaying a person’s back (a red cape), or another gruesome, bloody death, while choosing blue will cause the spirit to suffocate you. Getting clever and choosing any other color will just cause you to be dragged to the underworld. The only way to escape Aka Manto’s punishment is to decline its offer entirely.

Kappas may be repelled by farts, but they were known to appear in outhouses all the same. (YOSHITOSHI/PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Kappa

One of Japan’s most famous mythological creatures, the kappa is said to sometimes be found in bathrooms. “However, it is not specifically thought of as a bathroom spirit, but more generally as a creature associated with water—usually rivers or ponds. But there are a lot of legends in which the kappa appears in an outhouse, where it harasses people (especially women),” says Foster.

An Akaname creeping around a bathtub. (PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Akaname

This goblinesque yōkai spirit is filthy and disheveled, with a long, protruding tongue, and according to Foster, it is primarily known for licking the filth off of bathtubs. While not seen as a particularly frightening creature, the image of a gross little sprite licking the dirt off of a tub is not exactly friendly.

Japan’s bathroom spirits may appear to be uniquely ready to haunt your every bowel movement, but ultimately there are good reasons bathrooms everywhere tend to be a source of fear. “You are exposed and vulnerable—literally naked, at least in part—so there is a certain amount of danger or uncertainty associated with being there,” says Foster. “The bathroom is not a place you want to stay longer than necessary to complete the job you came to do.”

This article In Japan, ghosts haunt the bathroom is featured on Big Think.

Last December, Ukrainian police officers arrested eight men who had tried to steal a mural by the anonymous graffiti artist Banksy. Banksy had painted the mural — depicting a woman in a bathrobe with a gas mask holding a fire extinguisher — on a damaged building in Hostomel, a Kyiv suburb that was hit hard when Russia invaded the country in February 2022.  

When news of the attempted theft broke, various murals in Bansky’s native England were covered up with plastic sheets to protect them from vandalism — a cautious though in all likelihood unnecessary measure considering that the UK, unlike Ukraine, is not a lawless war zone.

Art as a casualty of war

The destruction or disappearance of art increases dramatically in times of war. Recent conflicts in Iraq, Libya, and Syria have led to the disappearance of innumerable artifacts. During the Second World War, the Nazis pillaged an estimated 20% of all European artwork. Some 600,000 pieces were taken from Jewish owners — a calculated attempt to erase their culture and history. Works of art that reflected Adolf Hitler’s ideology were taken back to Germany, to be placed in the planned but never constructed Führermuseum, while those that did not were destroyed without a second thought.

Despite efforts from government agencies and private art detectives, thousands of artifacts stolen by the Nazis have yet to be recovered. The same, it seems, will be true for Ukraine. The country’s National Resistance Center reports that, when Russian forces retreated from Kherson in November, they plundered over 15,000 exhibits from dozens of institutions, including the Oleksiy Shovkunenko Kherson Art Museum. A spokesperson from the museum said that the Russians stole “everything they saw, everything they could reach.” They were not exaggerating. News outlets have announced the disappearance of everything from ancient Scythian and Sarmatian gold to the bones of Prince Potemkin, a close friend of Russian empress Catherine the Great.

Russian looters are driven by the same motivation as their Nazi counterparts. By taking the bones of Prince Potemkin, for instance, Russia is undermining Ukrainian sovereignty and claiming its cultural heritage as its own. As Taras Voznyak, director of the Lviv National Art Gallery, told The Art Newspaper, “Putin knows that without art, without our history, Ukraine will have a weaker identity.”

Russia has been trying to steal Ukrainian artifacts long before the 2022 invasion. When its forces annexed Crimea in 2014, various museums from the region had lent Scythian gold to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. When the time came to return the gold, Allard Pierson was unsure whether to ship the borrowed items to occupied Crimea, or unoccupied Kyiv. A lengthy legal battle ensued. To this reporter’s knowledge, a Dutch court finally decided, in late 2021, that the gold should be returned to Kyiv. What happened to the artifacts following Russia’s invasion is unclear, though (as mentioned above) pieces of Scythian gold were reportedly confiscated from other regions of the country.

It should be noted that, in war zones, not all art is looted by the aggressors. “In fact,” Amr Al-Azm, a professor of Middle Eastern history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio, tells UNESCO, “most looting is carried out by locals in the area who have lost their livelihoods because of these conflicts, and turn to looting to survive. Terrorist groups are only one element of the different entities that exploit these ongoing conflicts.”

It appears that the looters who were arrested for attempting to steal the Banksy mural were Ukrainian citizens. When Banksy learned that vandals were selling pieces of their artwork on eBay, they understandably weren’t all that happy about it. “I give you art,” they said in an Instagram story, “and this is how you repay me.” Responses to the story reflect the complexity of the situation. “You mean poor people of Ukraine that are trying to make ends meet to survive?” one person comments. “Poverty is no excuse for crime,” another counters.

Ukraine’s black market

When people are not stealing art to destroy somebody’s heritage, they are doing it for financial gain. This is why a sizeable chunk of stolen art eventually ends up on the black market. At one point, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine obtained over 6,000 antiques that had been looted from Crimean institutions. The antiques, which included Scythian daggers and Trypillian pottery, were tied up in a money laundering scheme run by Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk.

More stolen artwork has been discovered by the Warsaw-based British archaeologist Paul Barford, who stumbled upon an eBay user selling Khazar antiques from European Russia, which originally may have belonged to Ukraine. “We know people in Russia have been buying stuff that was looted in Ukraine,” Andrew Hardy, a cultural property criminologist in Rome who shared Bradford’s find, told The Art Newspaper. “Some people in Russia have trading networks that flow west,” to Austria, Spain, and even the UK.

How to stop art theft

Just as the Ukrainian government is investing money and resources into its military, so too is it investing in the protection and reclamation of artwork. With help from Interpol, the International Council of Museums has provided customs officers with an emergency Red List. This list, which was compiled by museum workers throughout the country, helps law enforcement recognize missing artifacts when they are moved across national borders by traffickers.

And yet, despite these measures, stolen artwork still ends up on the black market. What else can be done to prevent this from happening? UNESCO has argued that people who buy from the black market should be punished as severely as the people that loot and traffic them. While the latter are fiercely prosecuted, the former typically get off with a warning. At best, they are ordered to return the object to its rightful owner. At worst, they also have to pay a fine. Stronger penalties, the argument goes, would discourage buyers from buying, causing the black market to collapse.

Aside from stronger penalties, there must be a change in mindset. At the moment, the art world is more concerned with making money than it is with protecting human heritage. When Christie’s auctioned off the head of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in 2019, everyone knew the artifact had been looted. They knew, but they did not care. What they did care about was when it had been looted. Specifically, whether it had been looted before or after 1970 — the year UNESCO introduced agreements for the sale of cultural property. As Laetitia Kaci declares on the organization’s website:

“As long as there are no fundamental changes in our society, looted antiquities, whether from war-torn countries or elsewhere, will continue to feed the art market. To what extent are auction houses, museums, and collectors responsible for illicit trafficking? Basically, I believe trafficking is like a bridge with two ends — there is supply and demand. On the supply end are the looters on the ground, who feed the network. On the other side are the buyers, both legitimate and illegitimate, who create the demand. We need to crack down on both sides to seriously tackle this problem. If only one side is addressed, the authorities will fail.”

This article How and why stolen Ukrainian art ends up on the black market is featured on Big Think.

There are at least two versions of the story of Pandora’s box. In the classic version from the Greek poet Hesiod, when Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, she unleashed into the world all sorts of evils: sickness, famine, death, and people who ask questions at the end of a meeting. When Pandora finally closed the jar, she left only one “evil” inside: hope. For Hesiod, there’s nothing so cruel as hope. Hope is what forces us to carry on building, fixing, and loving when the world offers only destruction, chaos, and heartbreak. It’s what gets us off the ground only to be punched back down. Hope is the naivety of a fool. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

Another variation of the Pandora’s box story is a Greek fable called “Zeus and the Jar of Good Things.” In this account, everything is inverted. The jar does not contain misery but good things. When “mankind” (there’s no Pandora in this version) opened the jar, they let out and lost all these good things: the things that would have made life a paradise. When the lid was closed, there was only one divine blessing left: “Hope alone is still found among the people.”

The author J.R.R. Tolkien and the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel would likely prefer the second version. After all, they considered hope to be perhaps the most important part of being human.

The eucatastrophe

Kurt Vonnegut is famous for writing novels like Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. In storytelling circles, he’s famous for his “shapes of stories.” These were eight diagrams that define the traditional arcs of common stories, like “Boy Meets Girl” or “From Bad to Worse.” His arc about fairy tales goes like this: Things start badly and then get a bit better. But then there’s a catastrophe that brings everything to ruin. The story ends with a drastic upheaval in fortunes — a transformation and magical finale — and everyone lives happily ever after.

Tolkien, were he alive, would agree. For him, the single most important element of a fairy tale is this final dramatic reversal of misfortune. He coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe it. “The consolation of fairy-stories [is] the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn,'” Tolkien wrote. The Lord of the Rings does not end with the hobbits dead and Sauron cackling over his orcish, industrial empire. It ends with light beating dark — with simple kindness, love, and companionship winning out over evil.

Lifting the heart

Tolkien is very careful to make the point that this is not some form of escapism. It’s not quixotic wish fulfillment. It does not pretend the world is an endlessly happy idyll of singing dwarves and affable wizards. The world has great suffering and misery, and there are plenty of nightmares to be found. The eucatastrophe, though, is “the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat.”

The purpose of a good fairy story is not to hide the shadows of the world. The original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (not the sanitized Disney versions) were full of infanticide, cannibalism, and horror. The mark of a good fairy story, Tolkien wrote, “…[is that] however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears.”

Hope is all we have

The religious undertones here are not accidental. Tolkien was a Catholic who was fond of the redemption and grace found in the narratives of the Bible. Marcel did not, as far as we know, read Tolkien, but his own philosophy of hope bears striking similarities.

What Tolkien describes as the eucatastrophe, or final deliverance, Marcel called hope. For Marcel, “Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories, and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.”

Hope is the belief in an order to the Universe — an order where everything will turn out well enough. It is a kind of faith that simply refuses to accept that things are broken, or that misery, suffering, and death are all that exist. Marcel was a Christian, but his account of hope can apply to anyone. The hopeful of the world are those who see the Universe as being on their side. Set against “all experience, all probability, all statistics,” they see that a “given order shall be re-established.” Hope is not a wish. It is not optimism or naivety. It is an assertion. It is telling the world, “No, this is not the way things will be; things will be better.” For both Marcel and Tolkien, it is only with hope that we banish despair.

You do not haggle with or beg the darkness. Like a blazing torch, you must shine hope brightly and fiercely.

This article “Eucatastrophe”: Tolkien on the secret to a good fairy tale is featured on Big Think.

On October 5, the Swedish Academy awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to Norwegian author and playwright Jon Fosse. The Academy recognized the writer for his “innovative plays and prose, which give voice to the unsayable.” Over the course of his professional career, which began with the publication of his first novel, Red, Black in 1983, the 64-year-old Nobel laureate has written over 40 plays and 30 books, alongside several dozens of essays, short stories, and poetry collections.

Fosse wasn’t expected to win the prestigious award. Ladbrokes, a sports betting company at the forefront of Nobel predictions, had previously identified Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Canada’s Margaret Atwood, and India’s Salman Rushdie as the most likely candidates. Also in the race were Chinese fiction writer Can Xue and Kremlin critic Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Not even fellow Scandinavians believed that Fosse stood a chance, with many proclaiming that the Swedish Academy electing a Norwegian recipient would be “too obvious.” Elsewhere, critics of the Academy’s admittedly Eurocentric track record — 15 of the past 20 prize winners (including last year’s Annie Ernaux) have been white — expected the institution to pick a person of color.

That’s not to say Jon Fosse isn’t worthy of the Nobel Prize. Far from it. Born in the coastal city of Haugesund, his early sources of inspiration included his guitar and the waves he could see rolling down the fjord from his bedroom window. A sentimental soul, his real name is Jon Olav, with Fosse being Norwegian for “waterfall.” Water is a suitable analogy for Fosse’s writing, which flows from clause to clause with little to no punctuation. Each installment of his Septology series, chronicling the life of a painter and widower, reads like one uninterrupted 700-page sentence.

The following excerpt, from a novel titled Aliss at the Fire, gives an impression of his stream-of-consciousness style:

I see Signe lying there on the bench in the room and she’s looking at all the usual things, the old table, the stove, the woodbox, the old paneling on the walls, the big window facing out onto the fjord, she looks at it all without seeing it and every-thing is as it was before, nothing has changed, but still, everything’s different, she thinks, because since he disappeared and stayed gone nothing is the same any-more, she is just there without being there, the days come, the days go, nights come, nights go, and she goes along with them, moving slowly, without letting any-thing leave much of a trace or make much of a difference, and does she know what day it is today? she thinks, yes well it must be Thursday, and it’s March, and the year is 2002, yes, she knows that much, but what the date is and so on, no, she doesn’t get that far, and anyway why should she bother? what does it matter any-way? she thinks, no matter what she can still be safe and solid in herself, the way she was before he disappeared, but then it comes back to her, how he disappeared, that Tuesday, in late November, in 1979, and all at once she is back in the emptiness…

Jon Fosse: poet or prose writer?

Although not technically a poet, Fosse’s writing and writing process are in many ways more akin to poetry than prose. Valuing rhythm over content, his work has to be experienced rather than processed, felt rather than thought over. Comparing Norway’s most accomplished writers to the Beatles, Damion Searls, a translator who said he was moved to tears while reading Septology, identified Fosse with band member George Harrison: “…the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all.” Fosse might agree, stating in a 2018 interview with the Financial Times that “you don’t read my books for the plots.”

Where prose tries to make sense of human existence, poetry has historically embraced its inherent inexplicability. Fosse, too, thinks of his work as transcendent. He told the LA Review of Books:

“When I sit down and start writing, I never intend for anything to happen. I listen to what I’m writing, and what happens happens. Of course, you can interpret it in several ways. It’s not my job to explain it — I’m just a writer. My interpretation would be less valuable than yours. But I feel that if I’m writing well, there’s a lot of what I might call meaning, even a kind of message. But I cannot put it into simple words. I can only guess as much as you can.”

Where prose deals exclusively in language, Fosse attempts to move beyond the written or even spoken word. From the same interview:

“When I manage to write well, there is a second, silent language. This silent language says what it is all about. It’s not the story, but you can hear something behind it — a silent voice speaking. It’s this that makes literature work well for me.“

While beloved by many, Fosse’s work concerns the few. His Septology, alongside his other writing, generally centers around society’s downtrodden: the working poor, alcoholics, social outcasts. For Norwegians, this association holds a double meaning, as Fosse writes not in Bokmål, the written standard used by 85 to 90% of the country, but in Nynorsk, a less popular but more distinct literary form derived from 19th-century country dialects. It’s a form of expression many English-language readers have been interested in picking up, not only to get closer to Fosse’s mind but also because English and Norwegian, belonging to the same linguistic family, are more similar than one might think.

Nobel Prize-winner is hardly the most treasured title under Fosse’s belt. For years, Norwegian readers have referred to him as “the new Ibsen,” the spiritual successor of the famed 19th-century playwright and theater director. In some ways, Fosse has even surpassed Ibsen. With plays translated into more than 50 languages — according to his translator Ann Henning Jocelyn — and performed in over 60 countries across the world, Jon Fosse has, for some years now, been regarded as the “most produced living dramatist” on Earth.

This article Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature is featured on Big Think.

In 1659, the Anglo-Irish chemist and natural philosopher (an early term for “scientist”) Robert Boyle presented an invention he called the “pneumatic engine.” Essentially an air pump, it was used to study the physiological processes of living things by reducing barometric pressure, providing concrete evidence for the biological importance of oxygen.

A pioneer of the scientific method, Boyle was proud of his air pump, and he believed wholeheartedly in the advances that it could lead to. At the same time, the more he tested the contraption, the more he was overcome by a sense of guilt. In a little-known manuscript titled “Moral Epistle Concerning Ethics of Treatment of Animals,” he acknowledged the anguish he incurred using the pneumatic engine on birds and other small creatures. In these pages, his unwavering faith in progress competes with another, seemingly contradictory emotion: a renewed appreciation for the divinity and sanctity of life.

Boyle’s situation wasn’t unique. Numerous people in Europe, the Americas, and the Islamic world expressed anxiety about how advances in science and technology were altering the way humanity made sense of the world and their place in it.

Illustrating this point even better than “Moral Epistle” is a 1768 oil painting by English artist Joseph Wright of Derby. Called An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, it depicts a natural philosopher demonstrating Boyle’s invention in front of an upper-class household. With his trademark use of chiaroscuro — a heightened contrast between light and dark — Wright directs our attention at the expressions of the participants, each of whom has a different reaction toward the experiment and its outcome. To those living in the 21^st century, the painting provides an overview of what average Europeans thought about the death of God and the rise of reason.

Testing the pneumatic engine

Before looking at these different reactions, it’s important to note that — by the time Experiment on a Bird was unveiled — the pneumatic engine was no longer the technological novelty it had been when Boyle first unveiled it a century earlier. It was, however, slowly becoming available to the general public, and it is this development that Wright, a portraitist of the scientific revolution and a proponent of the democratization of knowledge, sought to depict.

While many upper-class households in 18th century Europe were familiar with the pneumatic engine, they had only ever seen them illustrated in books and newspapers. Demonstrations, in lecture halls or in dining rooms, were still somewhat of a novelty, and seeing the engine in action was considerably different from reading about it on a yellowed piece of paper. The sounds, the smells, and the actual sight of the suffocating bird could evoke wonder in one bystander and terror in another.

Experiment on a Bird features ten human figures, their faces lit by a candle. The brightest — and therefore the one that attracts the viewer’s attention before anyone else — is that of a young girl. Clearly distressed, she looks up at the bird trapped in its glass chambers. Her arms are wrapped tightly around another girl, possibly her older sister, who is so frightened she cannot even bare to look. Comforting the girls is a man, perhaps their father, who raises his finger as if he is about to explain to her what is going on and, by extension, why she need not be afraid.

Left of the father is the natural philosopher carrying out the experiment. With his face half lit and half darkened by shadow, he moves with the grace of a magician. Behind him, further obscured by darkness, is a couple in love — so in love that, rather than observing the experiment, they look only at each other. Below them, seated at the table, are two men doing exactly the opposite. Their eyes fixed on the engine, they eagerly wait for the magician to perform his trick. Equally excited is the young boy closing the curtains on the right, a stark contrast with what are presumed to be his sisters.

The last figure that the viewer is likely to notice is arguably the most important in the entire composition. Seated and shrouded in darkness is an old man who, hands folded, looks not at the engine but at a human skull placed on the table. Contemplating the fragility and meaning of life, he stands in opposition to the father and the philosopher, both of whom are so caught up in the details of the experiment that they fail even to acknowledge the dying bird.

Ethics of science

Traditionally, art historians studying Experiment on a Bird have focused on the juxtaposition between the old man, the father, and the natural philosopher — scientific pessimism versus optimism. But people’s attitude toward this watershed stage in the history of civilization was more complex than that, and Wright — true to his reputation as a sensitive observer of both humans and human ingenuity — portrays multiple colors on the spectrum. The girls could represent naivité, innocence, and fear of the unknown. Their little brother, meanwhile, could only be interested in the experiment because of a boyish sadism. According to Matthew Morgan, formerly of the National Gallery, the two seated men behave suitably for their time: stoic and emotionless. One even pulls out a stopwatch to time how long the bird has left.

When all ten reactions are tallied, a pattern emerges. For most of the onlookers, curiosity overpowers their compassion for other living things. The core message of Wright’s painting is even clearer in the 21st century, a time when trust in progress and the inherent goodness of technological advancement has been irreparably damaged by a host of science-driven disasters, from Nazi medical experiments to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more.

Experiment on a Bird, much like the writings of Boyle himself, campaigns for a future where scientific research is guided by a code of ethics, religious or humanist. It is for this reason that the celebrated inventor of the air pump resolved to limit not just the severity of his experiments, but also the number of test subjects he used in them. Ultimately, Boyle’s experience as a natural philosopher taught him a lesson that conventional philosophy and theology had already formulated: that nothing, not even the testing of an air pump, can justify gratuitously inflicted pain.

This article How suffocating birds introduced Europe to the Scientific Revolution is featured on Big Think.

There are two kinds of fiction writers. First, some meticulously plan their book, page by page. They ask, “What information do I need to reveal?” and “Who says what to whom?” They know exactly what happens at the end. These writers often draw intricate, interweaving diagrams that look more like schematics than novels. J.K. Rowling, Joseph Heller, and Agatha Christie are all famous examples of this type of author. The second type is the “let’s see where this goes” kind of writer. They have an idea and a vague direction in mind, but let their characters and plots dance away as they feel. Stephen King is one such writer. He once wrote, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.” But then again, he is Stephen King.

Whatever approach they take, both types of writers can fall prey to the same problem: plot holes. Although plot holes have always existed in stories, the internet — where millions of people with their beady, forensic eyes can crowd-source their pedantry to unpick and unravel every little character and plot device — has brought to light countless narrative discrepancies, both big and small. Here, we look at some famous examples. (There will, inevitably, be spoilers.)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — Time-Turner

Time travel is always a messy plot device and suffers from two problems. On the one hand, you have a plot full of contradictions and paradoxes. For example, in the famous “grandfather paradox,” altering anything in the past (such as meeting your grandfather when he was a boy) should radically change the present you came from originally. On the other hand, if you want to make time travel seem plausible in your story, you have to have a narrative so heavily laden with technical exposition that it weighs down the entertainment factor.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series falls prey to the first problem. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Professor McGonagall gives Hermione a “Time-Turner” so she can go back in time to attend classes. Later, Harry and the team use the Time-Turner to save Sirius Black and Buckbeak, the hippogriff. It’s all very entertaining. But, then, the Time-Turner is forgotten. Even if we accept that Harry couldn’t just go back and kill baby Voldemort, all manner of evil could still have been prevented. Why didn’t Dumbledore, the most powerful wizard in the world, use it to go back and save Remus Lupin, Cedric Diggory, or Dobby, the house elf? Weirdly, this obvious strategy is never exploited.

War of the Worlds — Microbes

H.G. Wells’ novel, War of the Worlds, is the archetypal alien invasion story. After Martians land on Earth, with their heat rays and giant tripod war machines, they quickly set about taking over the world. Yet, eventually, the Martians fall prey to Earth’s microbes: the bacteria and viruses we’ve grown resistant to.

The problem is that we’re led to believe these Martians are hugely intelligent, highly advanced, and have been monitoring Earth for a long time. Humans have known about foreign microbes for centuries, and our astronauts take great precautions when coming back home. If a species as lacking in heat rays as us can predict a microbial attack, why couldn’t the Martians?

Twilight — Blood

In the Twilight universe, as with most vampire lore, vampires go crazy when they smell or see blood. They go into a bloodthirsty frenzy, held back by force or intense strength of will. Jasper, a vampire, is the worst such case, and the books feature him often going feral with bloodlust. Yet, in the high school he attends, roughly 25% of the women there will be bleeding. The vampires should be in a constant state of hungry madness. It’s often the case that, in a writer’s world, women don’t menstruate.

The Hobbit — Middle-earth

When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he intended it as a fun adventure story for children. It was, essentially, the collected narrative of all the fairy stories he’d told his kids over the years. He thought it was a small thing – a side project to be forgotten. His publishing house, George Allen & Unwin, was convinced to publish it because Stanley Unwin’s son, Rayner, liked it. Rayner wrote, with faint praise, “It is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.”

It appealed to many more people than that, and most of them were over nine years old. Tolkien was persuaded to work on a sequel, but this time to target adults. It took him about 12 years to write The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In that time, he invented an entire Elvish language, along with an encyclopedia’s worth of Middle-earth history. The problem is that Tolkien had never intended The Hobbit to fit into this vast, complicated lore. It was a bedtime story. The result is that The Hobbit has all sorts of problems. For instance, Gandalf is a bumbling, half-decent wizard, not the demi-god he later becomes. Gollum gives up the most powerful ring in the Universe over a riddle game. It takes the company far longer to get to Rivendell in The Hobbit than in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien acknowledged some of this and had a clever workaround: The Hobbit was written by Bilbo. It was not an accurate account but an interpretation and (mis)representation of the facts. Tolkien wasn’t an Oxford professor for nothing.

Raymond Chandler — The unsolved murder

Our last entry is perhaps more of a famous, decades-long gripe than it is a plot hole — but having a murder go unsolved in a detective story is arguably a worthy gripe.

In Raymond Chandler’s famous novel, The Big Sleep, we learn that a chauffeur, Owen Taylor, is found dead in his car, which has been dumped in a lake. Marlowe investigates his death, but he can’t find the killer. There are many suspects and dodgy characters, but we never find out who killed him. Given that Chandler was writing detective “whodunit” novels, this irritated, and still irritates, a lot of readers.

When the filmmakers came to turn The Big Sleep into a Hollywood success, they fumbled and staggered over this problem. They sent Chandler a telegram to ask him who killed Owen Taylor. Chandler’s response? “Damned if I know.” That’s as good an attitude as any to take about plot holes.

This article 5 great books with glaring plot holes is featured on Big Think.

In a recently published study, linguists at the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Brigham Young University reported that white Georgians seem to be losing their classic Southern accent. Analyzing vocal recordings of 135 native Georgians born between 1887 and 2003, they found that a few of the distinct vowel pronunciations that define the Southern accent have been disappearing over the generations. For example, words like “prize” and “fit” — once pronounced “prahz” and “feee-uht” — are now more often spoken as “prah-eez” and “fiht.” The shift was greatest between Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, and it has continued with Millennials and Gen Zers.

These findings are the latest from a string of studies showing that other regional accents are fading as well. New Englanders are pronouncing more Rs (“harbor” vs. “hahbah”). Michiganders are altering the way they say their As. And Texans are losing their twang.

The fading of America’s iconic accents

Margaret E. L. Renwick, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Georgia and lead author on the Georgia study, wasn’t overly macabre in a recent interview with NPR. But her statement didn’t exactly reassure…

“I don’t think the Southern accent is doomed,” she told Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe. “I think it means something different to people to be Southern today than it used to mean. And so I think the Southern accent is changing.”

What’s driving these changes? One might reasonably surmise that mass media could be to blame. In the latter half of the 20th century, television, radio, and the Internet brought all sorts of voices into Americans’ homes. Even from a very young age, we are exposed to an aurally diverse sample of speech. Maybe this homogenized American English?

Renwick isn’t so sure.

“Kids acquire language from their parents, from their caregivers,” she said. “Then, once kids get into school and enter adolescence, they emulate their peer group. And so we think that’s where language change from generation to generation really takes hold.”

Thus, linguists think the accent shifts they’re currently seeing have more to do with moving. Generally, the places where accents are changing the most have been the sites of significant immigration. As people mingle and converse — at work, in school, at restaurants — their accents go through a subtle process called leveling, where the variation between two or more ways of speaking diminishes. In this fashion, accents change over time.

For example, numerous research teams have noticed that an accent feature called the low-back-merger shift appears to be gaining prominence in the South and Northeast. In this way of speaking, two vowel sounds made with the tongue positioned low and back in the mouth are combined, becoming audibly indistinct. The sounds are the “o” in cot or box and the “au” in caught or dawn. This makes the words “cot” and “caught” sound the same.

Since the mid-1980s, Americans have been moving less and less. Moreover, 82% of moves are within the county or state. Thus, as Americans move less, it’s possible that accent shifts will also slow. But linguists say they will not cease. As long as humans have migrated and mixed, however gradually, speech has changed as well.

This article Are America’s distinct accents dying out? is featured on Big Think.

The twins in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining were never supposed to be identical. In Stephen King’s 1977 book, the Grady sisters are just sisters, eight and 10, and “cute as a button,” at least until spirits and isolation turned their father murderous (you know, just a regular Thursday at the Overlook Hotel). Soon after the book’s rise to the bestseller lists, Kubrick began production on the film, and auditioned numerous young actors to play the sisters. But when identical twins Lisa and Louise Burns waltzed in, they won the part. One of cinema’s greatest auteurs decided there was just something scarier about twins, the twins themselves told the Daily Mail in an interview.

The Burns twins’ turn as the Grady sisters is an iconic moment in a film full of them: “Come play with us, Danny.” Whether he considered it or not, Kubrick was playing with a stereotype that goes back centuries and continues to be a staple of the horror genre today. But what is it about identical twins that make them a subject of both fascination, fear, and oh so many stereotypes? Maybe a better question is what is it about the rest of us that makes this the case?

Between nine and 12 of every 1,000 deliveries produces twins, and around four of those are identical, or monozygotic, twins, according to a recent study in the journal Human Reproduction. Identical twins occur when a single sperm fertilizes a single egg and then splits in two, resulting in two zygotes with the same DNA. There are a lot of factors that make us who we are, but identical twins share the raw material. Why, however, many people find them interesting, unnerving, even scary, says more about general human psychology than it does twins themselves.

Gothic literature scholar Xavier Aldana Reyes of Manchester Metropolitan University wrote about twins in The Conversation, and says that part of what makes fictional twins so potentially frightening is their repetition. He links this to psychology’s definition of the “uncanny,” in which something familiar becomes unfamiliar—and therefore unsettling or creepy. According to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on the term, uncanniness can stem from the “repetition of the same thing.” It’s something that The Shining’s Grady twins, in their matching baby blue dresses and white stockings, play with. There’s a spookiness to when “something that should be the unique, the individual, find[s] a correspondence with the other,” says Reyes. It’s why, in part, mirrors freak us out so much, too.

A poster from the 1880 theatrical production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/LC-DIG-DS-04518)

In the early 20th century, Freud revolutionized the modern understanding of the unconscious mind, and with it “the concern that people weren’t always in full control of themselves, of their actions and thoughts,” says Reyes. That fear manifested in the 19th-century Gothic trope of the doppelgänger—a person’s double, sometimes evil or ghostly, wandering the streets, leading a parallel life.

In Gothic literature, the double is “the dark self or the shadow self,” says Reyes. “It’s a personification of everything that the normative, socialized person is not, right? If we’re supposed to be civil, if we’re supposed to be good, if we’re supposed to be mindful, then the double is the selfish, violent, unrepressed side.” Classic characters such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, play with this notion. In both stories, a double—not always a twin—wreaks havoc on a person’s life and sense of self.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, twins, particularly identical twins, entered the public eye in new ways, says literature scholar Karen Dillon of Blackburn College in Illinois, author of The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture. In many scientific studies, twins became test subjects—with one twin serving as a control. Twin studies, as the field is known, emerged in parallel with the American eugenics movement, and was taken to horrific extents by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. “Every major eugenics textbook has chapters on twins,” says Dillon. This fascination with and experimentation on twins often had the effect of othering them, distancing them from their own humanity. They were not people, exactly, but test subjects—as well as objects of curiosity, even sideshow attractions, which is true especially for conjoined twins (all of whom are monozygotic).

Scott and Mark Kelly (left to right) are both astronauts and participated in a NASA twin experiment to measure the effects of space on the body. (NASA/PUBLIC DOMAIN)

“Those two histories of twins that run parallel, to me, inform all our popular understandings of twinship—twins as freaks, and twins as unique and strange,” says Dillon.

The horror genre has long remixed and rehashed these tropes. One of the most common is the good twin/bad twin dichotomy. “The twins’ subtle differences create a happy/sad, good/bad, Jekyll/Hyde reading,” writes Dillon. Like with the double, the good/bad twins come to represent “two different sides of the same individual,” she says.

There’s often no explanation behind why one twin might be evil and the other not, says Dillon. “The evil of one twin just sort of emerges,” without explanation. The good/bad twin suggests “we can just be born evil because with twins, of course, they’re growing up in the exact same environment so they’re supposedly treated the exact same way.” Evil, therefore, is something beyond understanding or explanation.

In films, identical twins are often used in similar ways to Gothic literature’s doubles. As with the double, twins can express “the divided notion of the self,” says Reyes—that “there is no such thing as a holistic, coherent self.” In films, one actor often portrays both twins, such as Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or Margot Kidder in Brian De Palma’s 1972 Sisters. Using the same actor “creates a form of the visual uncanny that novels can only hope to recreate through your imagination,” says Reyes. Identical twins become a visual shorthand in film of the divided self—the evil self and the good self.

Another common trope, writes Dillon, is “twins’ shudder-inducing closeness.” Twins’ “insularity,” she says, stems from this sense of “two people who can be this whole world for each other. You know, twins in pop culture often communicate psychically or have their own sort of twin language or don’t need to communicate at all. They just seem so insular that no one can penetrate that relationship.”

Twin stereotypes are so entrenched that Dillon, an identical twin herself, remembers, “Every time I came across twins in pop culture, I was sort of like, ‘Oh god, the same representation of twins over and over.’” Growing up, many of those stereotypes informed how friends and family saw her and her sister. “I would be rich if I had a dime every time someone asked us, ‘Do you ever switch classes and trick your teacher? Can you read each other’s thoughts? Do you have a secret language?’” She says, “I even had uncles who were like, ‘Are you Karen or Carol? Oh, it doesn’t really matter.’

“It does wreak havoc with your psyche, honestly,” she says.

Victoria Morrell, mother of two pairs of identical twins and the communications officer at Twin Trust, an English charity that supports parents of twins and multiples, says raising twins is no easy task. “I always get asked which one is the naughty one,” says Morrell, but “it’s not really anything like that.”

“Growing up as a twin is a unique social context,” says Dillon, one that can make it difficult to define your own individual identity. While twin stereotypes can be “fun,” she adds, they also “can take a toll.” Both Morrell and Dillon would like people to treat twins as individuals. After all, Dillon says, “Twins are two people, two individuals who just happened to have shared a womb.”

This article The psychology behind why identical twins inspire fascination—and fear is featured on Big Think.

There is a lot of stuff in Middle-Earth — exquisite gems, magic rings, fabled swords, and ancestral talismans — as well as the more general matter of clothes and armor, megaliths and monuments, food and drink. A supernatural aura suffuses many of these things: stones (standing stones, Seeing Stones, ruins), trees (waking, walking, warring), and paths (traces and memories of ancient footsteps, sentient and animate, seeming to plot). Some things are more mundane (rations, gear), others immense, international enterprises — such as the outbreak of total war and the mass mobilization of armed forces across Middle-Earth, activating communities in different ways. 

In the context of all this stuff and all these happenings, many of the peoples of Middle-Earth are materialistic and often covetous in the extreme — the Elves fight for centuries over the Silmarils (coveted jewels); Dwarves are proverbially avaricious and bring ruin on themselves through mining too greedily or contracting dragon sickness in the face of opulent golden hoards; and even Hobbits can be jealous and acquisitive, apt to pilfer from family (the Sackville-Bagginses) and friends (Bilbo and the Arkenstone). This attention to solid objects, goods and chattels, treasure and riches gives Middle-Earth a palpable grain of reality, as well as imaginative affluence. Peter Jackson’s Rings productions are physically tangible too, with real props to give them the heft of reality, and there was an immediate market for replica artifacts from Wētā Workshop. 

Much of this stuff is simply weird. The bedrock of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth writing consists of a very English eeriness — what today is often described as “folk horror.” There are haunted ruins, stone circles, the undead; strange truths hidden in riddles and nursery rhymes; superstitions, herblore, and witchcraft; ancient inscriptions, cryptic manuscripts, and secret writings; amoral nature spirits and sentient landscapes; occult rites, drugs, and altered states; cryptobotany and cryptozoology; deluged territories that cry out for recognition; temporal distortions; and, nearly everywhere, the “Uncanny.” 

These elements are often radically developed, especially in cinematic adaptations, which can draw on a rich inheritance of earlier stage, film, and television to incorporate elements from Hamlet to Doctor Who. Tolkien’s works and their legacy are, then, both familiar and unfamiliar — and this is also one of their key themes: the search for home. Indeed, the very chapter titles of The Hobbit contrast the homely (“A Short Rest,” “A Warm Welcome,” “On the Doorstep”) with the unhomely (“An Unexpected Party,” “Queer Lodgings,” “Not at Home”), often ironically and in puns. Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam often think of home; Aragorn has yet to find his; and Thorin’s Company have lost theirs. 

Recent philosophy, in part inspired by Tolkien’s literary contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, has focused on such “weird realism” and how thinking in particular about objects can challenge or displace Human assumptions of the world by focusing on the perspective of things — such as a ring — and it is striking how Tolkien’s work exemplifies such approaches. As the philosopher Graham Harman argues, “It remains unclear just what objects are, but it is already clear that they far exceed the human-centered.” So can reality be perceived from the perspective of objects rather than the perspective of Humans; can objects be at the center of things? What are objects, and what can they teach us about species? Harman claims that “‘Object’ can refer to trees, atoms, and songs, and also to armies, banks, sports franchises, and fictional characters.”

The world therefore teems with stuff — loads of stuff everywhere, all the time — which persistently exposes the limitations of Human comprehension and perspectives. This school of thought, known as “Object-Oriented Ontology” or “Speculative Realism,” whispers of a world that is delineated and governed by things that we, as Humans, cannot understand — or even define — any more than we can know what it is like to be a bat: what is it like, now, to be a hammer, or the University of Oxford English Faculty? For the radical philosopher Eugene Thacker, these “blind spots” are an abiding concern because, for him, the world remains “superlatively beyond human comprehension.” Yet for Tolkien, buoyed by his Tridentine Catholic convictions and a sublime faith in eucatastrophe (blissful and unforeseen consummation), this sense of being beyond comprehension is not a cause of “cosmic pessimism” and a demonstration of the futility of thought, but the source of wonder.

The One Ring clearly has agency and its own, alien sentience; it can also grow and shrink. Harman describes plutonium as a “strange artificial material” that possesses ‘an additional reality . . . that is in no way exhausted by the unions and associations in which it currently happens to be entangled,” a reality that is “yet to be determined.” The Ring too has additional realities “yet to be determined”: when it is heated it remains cold but reveals a verse in a strange language; when it is worn it confers invisibility, enabling a character to be both there and not there; it emanates an aura of madness that is irresistible to some yet disregarded by others. 

Moreover, what becomes the key episode of The Hobbit — the finding of the Ring — is told and retold in The Lord of the Rings (being written and, importantly, rewritten by Tolkien) because that scene too contains “additional realities” and latent significance. Similarly, the palantίr (crystal ball) possesses a similarly almost radioactive power that tempts Pippin into stealing it from Gandalf, leads to the confusion not only of Denethor but also of Sauron, and which can be weaponized by Aragorn in confronting Sauron. The definition of objects — things — can, furthermore, be extended to include concepts, experiences, and activities, such as hospitality, sleep, songs, the dark, species, and, indeed, words: words are more stuff.

This article How Tolkien filled Middle-Earth with a “weird realism” philosophy is featured on Big Think.