Albert Einstein Explains How Slavery Has Crippled Everyone’s Ability (Even Aristotle’s) to Think Clearly About Racism

in History, Politics, Science | January 11th, 2017

Image by Ferdinand Schmutzer, via Wikimedia Commons

“Should we allow celebrities to discuss politics?” goes one variation on an evergreen headline and supposedly legitimate public debate. No amount of public disapproval could have stopped some of the most outspoken public figures, and we’d be the worse off for it in many cases. Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Nina Simone, George Carlin, Roger Waters, Margaret Cho, and, yes, Meryl Streep—millions of people have been very grateful (and many not) for these artists’ political commentary. When it comes to scientists, however, we tend to see more baseless accusations of political speech than overwhelming evidence of it.

But there have been those few scientists and philosophers who were also celebrities, and who made their political views well-known without reservation. Bertrand Russell was such a person, as was Albert Einstein, who took up the causes of world peace and of racial justice in the post-war years. As we’ve previously noted, Einstein’s commitments were both philanthropic and activist, and he formed close friendships with Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, and other prominent black leaders.



Einstein also co-chaired an anti-lynching campaign and issued a scathing condemnation of racism during a speech he gave in 1946 at the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall in which he called racism “a disease of white people.” That same year, notes On Being’s executive editor Trent Gilliss, Einstein “penned one of his most articulate and eloquent essays advocating for the civil rights of black people in America.” Titled “The Negro Question” and published in the January 1946 edition of Pageant magazine, the essay, writes Gilliss, “was intended to address a primarily white readership.”

Einstein begins by answering the inevitable objection, “What right has he to speak about things which concern us alone, and which no newcomer should touch?” To this, the famed physicist answers, “I do not think such a standpoint is justified.” Einstein believed he had a unique perspective: “One who has grown up in an environment takes much for granted. On the other hand, one who has come to this country as a mature person may have a keen eye for everything peculiar and characteristic.” Speaking freely about his observations, Einstein felt “he may perhaps prove himself useful.”

Then, after praising the country’s “democratic trait” and its citizens’ “healthy self-confidence and natural respect for the dignity of one’s fellow-man,” he plainly observes that this “sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins.” Anticipating a casually racist defense of “natural” differences, Einstein replies:

I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences. And yet Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, declared slaves inferior beings who were justly subdued and deprived of their liberty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a traditional prejudice from which, despite his extraordinary intellect, he could not free himself.

Like the ancient Greeks, Americans’ prejudices are “conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment.” And racist attitudes are both causes and effects of economic exploitation, learned behaviors that emerge from historical circumstances, yet we “rarely reflect” how powerful the influence of tradition is “upon our conduct and convictions.” The situation can be remedied, Einstein believed, though not “quickly healed.” The “man of good will,” he wrote, “must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.”

Read the full essay at On Being, and learn more about Einstein’s committed anti-racist activism from Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor’s 2006 book Einstein on Race and Racism.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

in Film | January 11th, 2017

You could describe every act of filmmaking as an act of film criticism, and for no group of directors has that held truer than those of the French New Wave. In one of the most exciting chapters of cinema history thus far, the late 1950s and 1960s saw such newly emergent auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and André Bazin turn away from the established practices of filmmaking and, by a mixture of inclination and necessity, start a few of their own.

They followed these new rules to come up with pictures like Le Beau Serge, Breathless, The 400 Blows, Last Year at Marienbad, Cléo from 5 to 7, and La Jetée. Those and the other movies of the Nouvelle Vague startled viewers with their boldness of form and content, but what of importance do they have to say in film culture today? Lewis Bond of Channel Criswell, source of video essays previously featured here about filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Akira Kurosawa, looks at the lasting achievements of the movement in “Breaking the Rules.”



The members of the French New Wave told personal stories that reflected personal philosophies, shooting documentary-style with handheld cameras, cutting those shots together with previously unheard of conspicuousness, and using a variety of other visual and narrative techniques to establish a new relationship between films and their viewers. “If you’re still skeptical as to whether the nouvelle vague intentionally toyed with the audience’s expectations,” says Bond over a selection of fourth-wall-breaking shots, “just look at how many times their movies directly acknowledge them. The nouvelle vague wanted to have the audience tested as to what could be a movie and how they could push the boundaries of storytelling, not just with their techniques but with their content too.”

And what do we jaded 21st-century viewers and filmmakers still have to learn from all this? “Just watch the films. They’re so ahead of their time, it’s not difficult to see” the influence of their editing on the Scorseses of the world, their concept of the auteur on the Tarantinos, and their camera movement on the Luzbekis of today. “The thing that the filmmakers of la nouvelle vague did was utilize one of the most important processes I think there is for an artist: look at what works in your medium and think, ‘How can it be done differently?’ Because if you don’t have anything new to say, what’s the point of saying anything?” And, now as in the mid-2oth-century as in the centuries before cinema itself, if you do have something new to say, you can’t say it by following the old rules.

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How Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai Perfected the Cinematic Action Scene: A New Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The American Novel Since 1945: A Free Yale Course on Novels by Nabokov, Kerouac, Morrison, Pynchon & More

in Literature, Online Courses, Yale | January 11th, 2017

Taught by professor Amy Hungerford, The American Novel Since 1945 offers an introduction to the fertile literary period that followed World War II. The course description reads:

In “The American Novel Since 1945” students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel’s form, fiction’s engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.

You can watch the 26 lectures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes (video – audio). To get more information about the course, including the syllabus, visit this Yale website.

The main texts used in this course include:

The American Novel Since 1945 will be added to our collection, 1200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. There you can find a specialized list of Free Online Literature Courses.

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Hear Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” Covered in Unexpected Styles: Gregorian Choir, Cello Ensemble, Finnish Bluegrass, Jazz Vocal & More

in Music | January 11th, 2017

They may have arrived on the scene in the 80s as one of the four horsemen of thrash metal—kin to such cuddly acts as Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer—but believe or not, Metallica had some serious crossover appeal from the start. Granted, that appeal was limited to a small subset of punks and skaters who came to appreciate metal thanks to Metallica’s covers of horror-punks The Misfits on their 1987 Garage Days Revisited EP. Nonetheless, it showed that the band always had a sense of humor and an appreciation for other—albeit very closely-related—genres.

Since then, Metallica has grown up, sometimes awkwardly. We watched them do it with the help of a therapist in the 2003 documentary Some Kind of Monster. We listened to their grown-up angst on that bummer of an album, St. Anger.  That year, they also took on a fourth member, bassist Robert Trujillo, whose extra-genre affinities are broad and deep—from his love for Motown, funk, and the athletic fusion of Jaco Pastorius to his dabbling in flamenco. The band may have returned to their thrash roots with 2008’s Death Magnetic and this year’s Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, but they’ll likely take a few more weird excursions (like their puzzling 2011 collaboration with Lou Reed) in coming years.

And yes, they gained a reputation as being stingy with their catalog during that whole Napster dust-up. But as you can hear James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett discuss in a recent Nerdist podcast (stream it at the bottom of this post), their “creative restlessness” has made them very appreciative of what other artists have done with their music, stretching it into alien genres and unexpected instrumentation and arrangements.



In his self-deprecating way, Hetfield confesses, “there’s a lot of better versions of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ than ours.” Hammett agrees, and here you’ll find most of those they mention—from Scott D. Davis on solo piano at the top of the post, to a choir at Santiago de Compostela with their Gregorian Chant version below it, and, just above, Finnish cello ensemble Apocalyptica.

It may not be many people’s favorite Metallica song, but I think the vast range of worthy interpretations speaks to the strengths of its composition. “Nothing Else Matters” has even translated to bluegrass, thanks to Finnish pickers Steve ‘N’ Seagulls, who specialize in such tongue-in-cheek country metal covers. And Hetfield and Hammett both mention with awe Macy Gray’s smoky lounge-jazz cover, below. “That’s an honor,” says Hetfield, “that is a huge compliment, when someone takes your song and legitimately does it their style…. It’s really cool to think that the song is that good it can work in any different genre.”

Indeed. Have a listen to SHEL’s haunting cover of another Metallica dirge, “Enter Sandman” or Stary Olsa’s riff on the mostly dirge-like “One.” And it doesn’t only work with the slow tunes either. Just check out this killer banjo version of “Master of Puppets.”

Hear Metallica talk cover versions (around 50:00), the joys and woes of still touring after all these years, and more at the Nerdist podcast just above.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspiring Artists: “Go a Little Out of Your Depth,” “Never Fulfill Other People’s Expectations”

in Life, Music | January 10th, 2017

David Bowie died one year ago today. Revisiting my own memories of him, it so often seemed impossible that he could grow old, much less pass away, even as we all watched him age over the decades. He did it much better than most, that’s for sure, and grew into the role of elder statesman with incredible poise and grace, though he also didn’t let that role be his last one.

What else should we have expected from the artist who wrote “Changes”—the definitive creative statement on facing time and mortality—at the age of 24, before he’d even achieved the international superstardom that Ziggy Stardust brought him? Bowie was always an old soul. “It’s not age itself,” he told the BBC in 2002. “Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys…. I embrace that aspect of it.” And so, in his later years, he became an older guy hero to millions.



In 1997, after his drum and bass-inspired Earthling, Bowie gave an interview in which he offered the timeless wisdom to younger artist in the clip above:

Never play to the gallery…. Never work for other people in what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society…. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations.

It’s advice we’ve likely heard some version of before—perhaps even from one of Bowie’s own older-guy heroes, William S. Burroughs (here by way of Patti Smith). But I’ve never heard it stated so succinctly and with so much conviction and feeling. We naturally associate David Bowie with artful inauthenticity, with a succession of masks. He encouraged that impression at every turn, even telling a graduating Berklee College of Music class in 1999, “it seemed that authenticity and the natural form of expression wasn’t going to be my forte.”

But in hindsight, and especially in the rapt, posthumous attention paid to Bowie’s final work, Blackstar, it can seem that his embrace of poses was often itself a pose. Bowie has always been candid, in various moments of self-reflection, about his missteps and excesses. But not to have taken the risks he did, not to have placed himself in uncomfortable situations, would have meant impoverishing his work. “The other thing I would say,” he goes on, “is that if you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Hear Bowie in a longer excerpt from that same interview talk about his influences and inspirations just above.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Oldest Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

in History, Music | January 10th, 2017

Classical music enthusiasts seem to agree that the renewal of interest in period instruments made for a noticeable change in the sound of most, if not all, orchestral performances. But doesn’t the replication and use of viols, ophicleides, and fortepianos from the times of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart raise a curiosity about what people used to make music generations before them, and generations before that? How early can we get into early music and still find tools to use in the 21st century? Since the end of the 20th, we’ve had the same answer: about nine millennia.

“Chinese archeologists have unearthed what is believed to be the oldest known playable musical instrument,” wrote Henry Fountain in a 1999 New York Times article on the discovery of “a seven-holed flute fashioned 9,000 years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large bird.”



Those holes “produced a rough scale covering a modern octave, beginning close to the second A above middle C,” and the fact of this “carefully selected tone scale indicates that the Neolithic musicians may have been able to play more than single notes, but actual music.”

You can hear the haunting sounds of this oldest playable musical instrument known to man in the clip above. When would those prehistoric humans have heard it themselves? Fountain quotes ethnomusicologist Frederick Lau as saying that these flutes “almost certainly were used in rituals,” perhaps “at temple fairs, burials and other ritualistic events,” and possibly even for “for personal entertainment.” 9,000 years ago, one surely took one’s entertainment where one could find it.

If this listening experience has given you a taste for the real oldies — not just the AM-radio but the history-of-mankind sense — you can also hear in our archive the 43,000-year-old “Neanderthal flute” (found only in fragments, but reconstructed) as well as such ancient songs as 100 BC’s “Seikilos Epitaph,” a composition by Euripides from a century before that, and a 3,400-year-old Sumerian hymn known as the oldest song in the world, all of which raises an important question: what will the people of the year 11000 think when they unearth our DJ rigs, those artifacts of so many of our own ritualistic events, and give them a spin?

You can get more information on this ancient flute here.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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How The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cover Design Forever

in Art, Music | January 10th, 2017

I am older than Evan Puschak, The Nerdwriter, one of a handful who have mastered the online video essay. But I still find myself agreeing with his take on the music video as mostly unnecessary and distracting. At least at first. Then I get nostalgic and remember some of the videos of my youth, like, say The Cure’s “Pictures of You” or Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”—both bittersweet tracks about nostalgia—and I feel differently. The video can have a powerful emotional pull on us. But its power to sell music has perhaps never matched that of the album cover, even after the death of the record store. Puschak makes the case that The Beatles forever changed the form, making it into the “almost limitless” art we know today.

Another critic besides Puschak—one who remembers buying a first pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—might be alleged to have fallen victim to a reverie. But there is nostalgia and there are qualitative historical arguments, and Puschak, a consummately careful, if exceedingly concise, essayist, makes the latter. In times past, he informs us, during the first few decades of the industry, record covers were more or less utilitarian brown paper bags, with some exceptions. Then came Columbia Records designer Alexander Steinweiss in 1938 to revolutionize album art, initiating a “huge boom in sales.” The market followed suit and record shops bloomed with color as album covers became little billboards for their contents.



“Since music has no spatial dimension,” and we can’t hold it in our hands, “the album cover emerged as the stand-in for the commodity to be purchased. This explains the so-called “personality cover” featuring prominent band photos that look like portraits of actors’ troupes. It’s a convention The Beatles dutifully observed on their first few sleeves in the early sixties. As their stature increased, however, the band “seemed to become darkly aware of their status as commodities.” (Thus the glum looks on the cover of their unsubtly titled 1964 Beatles for Sale.)

Their evolution from the teenpop “personality cover” to the broody and surreal is self-evident, from Rubber Soul’s groovy band shot and psychedelic lettering to Revolver’s take on Aubrey Beardsley, courtesy of Klaus Vormann, “The Beatles were leaders in expanding an album cover’s function from a marketing tool to a work of art in its own right.” Then we come to Sgt. Pepper’s, and the shift is cemented. The album cover’s designer, Peter Blake, explicitly thought of the cover as “a piece of art rather than an album cover. It was almost a piece of theater design.” And the band themselves had a direct hand in its creation. “We all chose our own colours and our own materials,” noted McCartney.

They also chose most of the people on the cover (out of many who turned them down or didn’t make the final cut). By “juxtaposing highbrow artists and thinkers with pop icons,” says Puschak, “The Beatles signal the breakdown and mixing of high and low culture that they themselves exemplified.” What’s brilliant about the cover is that it taps into the band and the record buyer’s nostalgia with an open acknowledgement of the music as commerce. “We liked the idea of reaching out to the record-buyer,” McCartney recalled, “because our memories of spending our own hard-earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money.”

But, as Puschak points out, the Sgt. Pepper’s cover also serves as its own critique. “By staging the scene as a performance and an audience,” he says, “the band challenges us to deal with the function of both.” That this message coincides with their decision to stop touring suggests that the band was using the album cover as they were using their music to draw the audience closer and give them the private emotional and aesthetic experiences so many inviting album covers now routinely promise. Designer Blake and the band encouraged listeners to have an intellectual relationship with the record from the very start, with the cryptic who’s-who puzzle photomontage of famous people and the lyrics printed directly on the back. In so doing, they announced that although recorded music was inescapably a commodity, it was also, inseparably, a modern art.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Corkscrew: The 700-Pound Mechanical Sculpture That Opens a Wine Bottle & Pours the Wine

in Art, Food & Drink, Technology | January 10th, 2017

We’ve shown you a very simple way to open a bottle of wine, with nothing but a wall and a shoe. (Try it at your own risk.) Now comes the most artfully complex.

Above, watch Rob Higgs demo his mechanical sculpture, “The Corkscrew.” Created with found objects from scrapyards and farmsteads, the sculpture has 382 moving parts and weighs 700+ pounds, reports the BBC. Designed to pull a cork from a bottle and pour the wine, the steampunk sculpture is not just beautiful. It actually works.

According to the Daily Mail, you could buy “The Corkscrew” for somewhere bewteen $90,000 and $120,000.

via Devour

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George Michael Gives a Stunning Performance of “Somebody to Love” with Queen, As David Bowie Nods Along in the Wings

in Music | January 9th, 2017

It’s been a year tomorrow since David Bowie left the planet, just two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his phenomenal and difficult final album. His death began a year of shocking losses, ending with two in quick succession that grieved not only their lifelong fans, but also people who knew their work primarily from samples, remixes, and reboots: the immortally funny Carrie Fisher and, of course, on Christmas Day, the uncanny pop music force-of-nature, George Michael. As cosmic justice would have it, these were two of the most outspoken characters in popular culture—two people who refused to be shamed into silence or apologize for their lives.

George Michael weathered what is hard to believe was a genuine scandal at the time: his 1998 Beverly Hills arrest, subsequent vicious outing by the press, and the sordid poring over of his private life. He responded to every provocation with defiance and, writes Christo Foufas, “went on the offensive.”



In his controversial video for the single “Outside,” for example, his turn as a wickedly satirical disco cop so effectively piqued the police that his arresting officer sued him for slander, and lost. The publicity surrounding Michael at the height of his post-Wham! fame seemed to liberate him to become more and more himself in the public eye, but it never obscured what made him a star in the first place—his soaring, confident voice and impeccable musical instincts.

It is these qualities—Michael’s bravado and true skill as a vocalist and performer—that also made him an absolute perfect choice to cover an earlier gay icon gone before his time, Freddie Mercury. In his rendition of “Somebody to Love” with Queen at Mercury’s 1992 tribute concert Michael delivered a stunning performance; while he lacked Mercury’s range, he nearly matched the former Queen singer in power and charisma. And while we see can this feat on display in the official concert video, above, it’s just as evident in rehearsal footage, which you can see at the top of the post.

Immediately after Michael’s death, this rehearsal video began making the rounds on social media, and people highlighted not only his mastery of a very challenging vocal melody, but the appreciation of fellow Mercury tribute performer David Bowie, whom we see nodding along in the wings at around 3:00. It’s a very poignant moment, in hindsight, that underlines some of the significant similarities between the two stars. Not only were they both sexually adventurous chameleons and riveting performers, but—as we learned in story after story shared in their many posthumous tributes—both men used their status to help others, often anonymously.

The Mercury tribute concert, an AIDS benefit, took place five years before Michael’s arrest and public full disclosure of his sexuality. But even before he felt comfortable discussing his personal life, he involved himself in the lives of others who struggled with similar issues, including depression. From the earliest Wham! days of “Choose Life” t-shirts and “cheeky critiques of heteronormative life” to Michael’s barnburning performance with Elton John at Live Aid in 1985 and beyond, he was “a father figure for political pop,” writes Barry Walters at NPR, and a role model for a generation of young gay men and women. And “it didn’t hurt that he could write and sing soul music with effortless power and grace,” even recording a duet “with Aretha Franklin without making a fool of himself,” and filling the shoes, for one night at least, of the legendary Freddie Mercury.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to the Feminist Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (on Her 109th Birthday)

in Animation, Philosophy | January 9th, 2017

How influential are the writings of Simone de Beauvoir? So influential that even the rushed, by all accounts shoddy first English translation (executed by a zoologist not especially acquainted with philosophy, and only somewhat more so with the French language) of her book Le deuxième sexe became, in 1953, The Second Sex. Though not properly translated until 2009, it nevertheless provided the foundation for modern feminist thought in the West. But what, if we can ask this question surely at least a couple of “waves” of feminism later, did de Beauvoir, born 109 years ago today, actually think?

She thought, as the Harry Shearer-narrated History of Ideas animation from the BBC and Open University above puts it, that “a woman isn’t born a woman, rather she becomes one,” meaning that “there is no way women have to be, no given femininity, no ideal to which all women should conform.”



The basic biological facts aside, “what it is to be a woman is socially constructed, and largely by males at that. It is through other people’s expectations and assumptions that a woman becomes ‘feminine,'” struggling to meet male-defined standards of beauty, acting like nothing more than “passive objects” in society, and in the feminist view, often wasting their lives in so doing.

A bold declaration, especially at the time. But de Beauvoir’s belief “that women are fundamentally free to reject male stereotypes of beauty and attractiveness, and to become more equal as a result” basically aligned with the existentialist movement then rising up through the zeitgeist. (Demonstrating that the philosophical extends to the personal, she spent much of her life in an open relationship with her fellow existentialist icon Jean-Paul Sartre.) Yet it hasn’t really gone stale, and has indeed proven adaptable to various different interpretations, eras, and contexts — including, as we can see in the 8-Bit Philosophy video above, video games.

“This is Samus, defender of the galaxy,” says its narrator, introducing the space-suited protagonist of the classic Nintendo game Metroid. “For those of you that don’t know, Samus is a woman.” This fact, revealed only after the defeat of the final boss, jolted the gamers of the day. Metroid came out in 1986, just months after de Beauvoir’s death, and it came out onto a video-gaming landscape where player characters’ maleness went without saying, where “man is a savior and the feminine is a damsel in distress. Man is a subject whereas woman is the object of possession.” But to de Beauvoir’s mind, “a fundamental ambiguity marks the feminine being,” leaving women — of any country, of any time, or of actual or digital reality — much greater freedom to define themselves than they may know.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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