The Painters of 1839 and the Question of Now
Human Meme
Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. François Arago, perpetual secretary of the Académie des Sciences, stands at a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He reads into the record the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process. The French state has acquired the rights from Daguerre and Isidore Niépce in exchange for life pensions of six thousand francs per year and four thousand francs per year. Sunlight, Arago tells the chamber, can now be made to draw its own pictures. Within weeks the satirical press of Paris is...
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UNDERWRITTEN
Human Meme
I want to start with four seconds. If you watched public television anywhere in the United States between 1971 and January of this year, you know these four seconds. A human face in profile, rendered first in the three colors of mid-century corporate design, recast in 1984 as a trio of interlocking faces on a field of white. Six synthesizer notes descending, resolving to a sustained major ninth chord. A voice that said three words. This is PBS. The sequence took less than four seconds. Before it ran: documentaries, children's programming, nature films, dramatic adaptations of novels too...
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The Apothecary Who Was Not Written
Human Meme
Shakespeare wrote the apothecary twenty lines and then disappeared him from the text. Think about what that means for a moment. Romeo, banished to Mantua, walks into a shop and asks a starving man to sell him poison. The apothecary refuses. The apothecary cites the law. Mantua punishes the sale of such drugs with death. Romeo counters that the world affords no law to make him rich. Forty ducats change hands. A vial changes hands. Romeo leaves. Shakespeare's attention returns to Verona, to the tomb, to the reconciliation of the feuding houses. The apothecary remains in his shop. He has forty...
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The Claimed Body
Human Meme
1862. That is the year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act finally repealed the Homestead Act in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker. That is how the American...
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Carceral Nation: The Pause Before You Speak
Human Meme
We talked once on this podcast about the pause before a lie. That episode, "Pause Before the Lie," examined the 200-millisecond hesitation that researchers have measured in the human voice when a speaker is about to say something untrue. I argued that the pause was proof of consciousness caught between realities, and that the hesitation itself might be the most human thing about us. Today I want to talk about a different pause. A longer one. One that has nothing to do with lying and everything to do with freedom. Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, you started to type something and...
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The Grammar of Want
Human Meme
I was seven years old, sitting on red shag carpeting in Nebraska, in front of a wood-grain television cabinet heavy enough that two adults would struggle to move it. It was a Saturday morning in October 1972. My mother was somewhere else in the house, or she was not home. Curtains were drawn. A rotary dial on the front of the cabinet clicked through thirteen VHF positions, though only three of them produced a signal. The rest produced static, a white hiss I associated with emptiness. I turned on the set myself. No one helped me. No one told me to. I did not know I was being trained.
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The Human Universal Beautiful
Human Meme
In the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak Carousel projector. Greek marble. Benin bronze. Mughal miniature. Japanese woodblock. The professor's argument was plain: these works endured because they were beautiful, and beauty was the thread that connected every person in that room to every person who had ever stood before the original object. Down the hall, in a different semester, a film professor made a different case. Beauty, he said, was larger than prettiness. The ugly, the reprehensible,...
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The Voice That Wasn't Yours
Human Meme
Three seconds. That is all it takes. Three seconds of your voice, captured from a public meeting, a conference call, a video posted to social media, and a machine can learn to speak as you. It can produce your cadence, your rhythm, the way you pause before a name, the way your pitch drops when you are certain. It can say things you have never said, in rooms you have never entered, to people you have never met. And the people who hear it will believe it is you, because the only test the human ear can perform is recognition, and recognition is no longer proof of origin. This is the condition...
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The Counterfeit Bargain
Human Meme
Twenty-one violinists walked into a hotel room in Indianapolis in 2010. They were experienced soloists, people who had spent decades training their ears. The room was dimly lit. They wore modified welding goggles so they could not see the instruments. And they were handed violins, some worth twelve million dollars, some worth a few thousand, and asked to play them, compare them, and choose the one they would take home. Two-thirds chose a modern violin. The most-selected instrument in the entire test was new. The least-selected was a Stradivarius. That experiment opens my new book, The...
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Forty-One Houses and the Price of the Empty Seat
Human Meme
There are forty-one Broadway theatres. That number has been effectively frozen for nearly a century. The oldest of them opened in 1903. The newest was assembled in 1998 from the demolished remains of two older houses. Between those dates, the city tore down theatres, condemned theatres, converted theatres into parking garages and television studios and conference venues. What remains is forty-one buildings, most of them constructed before 1930, clustered in a rectangle of midtown Manhattan roughly thirteen blocks long and three avenues wide. On a Wednesday evening, all of them are running....
info_outlineIn the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak Carousel projector. Greek marble. Benin bronze. Mughal miniature. Japanese woodblock. The professor's argument was plain: these works endured because they were beautiful, and beauty was the thread that connected every person in that room to every person who had ever stood before the original object.
Down the hall, in a different semester, a film professor made a different case. Beauty, he said, was larger than prettiness. The ugly, the reprehensible, the fantastic, the comic: all of these were forms of beauty because all of them enchanted and instructed. A movie theater was a secular chapel. We watch together because beauty is a collective event.
Both professors were right. Both were incomplete. And the question that has taken me forty years to formulate is the question my new book, The Human Universal Beautiful, attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection? Who writes the lesson plan?