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- ‘Mein Kampf’ as a Propaganda Playbook

- When Design Is the Problem

- Sex and ‘Female Semen’ in the Medieval Arab World

- The Man Who Invented Times Square: O.J. Gude and the Birth of the Spectacular

- How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism

- Mind-Reading and Neuroplasticity: In Conversation With Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone

- The Tyranny of the Template: The Graphic Design of the First Edition of ‘Learning From Las Vegas’

- Moshe Safdie: My Steps and Gardens and Bees

- The Absence of Black Soldiers in Civil War Photos Speaks Volumes

‘Mein Kampf’ as a Propaganda Playbook

"Mein Kampf" is both a manifesto of ideological hatred and a strategic guide for manipulation. Its tactics remain disturbingly relevant.

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler openly declares that propaganda is a means to an end. It is supposed to make “everyone … convinced that the fact is real," excluding debate of the matter’s merit.

By: Albrecht Koschorke

9:56AM, 18 Jul, 2024

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was banned in Germany for almost 70 years, kept from being reprinted by the accidental copyright holder, the Bavarian Ministry of Finance. In December 2015, the first German edition of “Mein Kampf” since 1946 appeared, with Hitler’s text surrounded by scholarly commentary apparently meant to act as a kind of cordon sanitaire. And yet the dominant critical assessment (in Germany and elsewhere) of the most dangerous book of the 20th century is that it is boring, unoriginal, jargon-laden, badly written, embarrassingly rabid, and altogether ludicrous. (Even in the 1920s, the consensus was that the author of such a book had no future in politics.) How did the unreadable “Mein Kampf” manage to become so historically significant? In his short book “On Hitler’s Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism,” German literary scholar Albrecht Koschorke attempts to explain the power of Hitler’s manifesto by examining its narrative strategies. In the following excerpt, Koschorke argues that its effectiveness lies in its dual-layered messaging: For the masses, “Mein Kampf” provides a scapegoat for social ills and fuels racial hatred; for the initiated, it serves as a manual on gaining power through propaganda.

A legend surrounds Hitler’s bellicose work “Mein Kampf,” which has been served up time and again: In spite of its massive distribution to schools and libraries and despite the fact that it was handed out as a matter of duty at civil registries, the book is supposed to have remained unread because, all in all, it is unreadable. The legend warrants notice insofar as Hitler, in the preface, does not address himself to “strangers, but to those adherents of the movement who belong to it with their hearts.” Five hundred pages later, in the second volume, he bluntly declares that “the mass of people is lazy,” never reads books, and has only a brief attention span, anyway. Any readers who have stuck with him until this point may therefore consider themselves to number among the initiated — whose understanding comes at the expense of others. This fits with Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian regimes are organized on the model of secret societies and operate according to a system distinguished by subtle gradations of participation. That said, the rub of the National Socialist ideology is that it openly displayed — to anyone with eyes to see — not just its popular [völkisch] and spectacular aspect but also, and to an astonishing degree, the arcana of its techniques of power.

This article is excerpted from Albrecht Koschorke’s book “On Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

Indeed, Hitler candidly discusses how to employ the tools of propaganda. This fact manifestly contradicts the widespread assumption that ideologies function only if they conceal the ways and means that they are fabricated. “Mein Kampf” is arranged so that one may read it on two levels. For pages on end, it holds forth about Marxist intrigue and Jewish freeloading. Thereby, it satisfies the same primitive, ideological hunger of readers who, a few years after the book’s publication, would feed on Julius Streicher’s newspaper, Der Stürmer. In this capacity, “Mein Kampf” stands as a testimony to blind racial mania. But for all that, Hitler does not present himself as a fanatical Jew hater from the outset. Instead, he makes a point of authenticating his anti-Semitism by depicting it as the result of a learning process. On this score, his account agrees with historical research, even if he backdates his “transformation.” No anti-Semitic remarks are recorded from his time in Vienna. He struck this tone only when declaiming in Munich beer halls — in other words, after his decision (dating to the “years of upheaval, in 1918–19”) to “go into politics.”

Verification of the facts, nuance, decorum, and “criteria of humanitarianism and beauty” are deemed irrelevant, consigned to a self-satisfied world apart, and subjected to ridicule.

Why does Hitler — who is so fond of declaring that even his earliest decisions were “unwavering” and who constantly undermines the principle of development inherent in autobiography by affirming that he has never changed any of his fundamental positions — not claim always to have held a “rock-solid” and “steadfast” opinion about world Jewry? One reason, as suggested above, is that he thought it more effective, in psychological terms, to meet readers on the level of whatever human compassion they still felt, instead of foisting a completed dogma on them. In the early stages of radical political movements, it is still necessary to consider skepticism on the part of those who have not yet been fully converted. However, the strategic placement of the conversion narrative points to a second aspect of the book concerned less with ideology itself than with its technical production.

At this juncture, a remark on the circumstances attending the genesis of “Mein Kampf” is in order. Even though it has long been rumored that parties close to Hitler contributed to the book’s writing, the greatest part was authored by Hitler himself, on his own. All the same — and counter to what the book itself claims — “Mein Kampf” is not the result of the individual’s power of creation. For one, the typescript was reworked on the way to press. Tellingly — and to the detriment of style — the changes introduced elements of speech into the written document. Nor is everything that the inmate at Landsberg Prison typed out early in the morning fashioned entirely from scratch. Hitler recorded what had proven successful in völkisch circles. Indeed, he did not even shape his own profile as a propagandist. Rather, he owed this image to the influence, support, and training provided by the Bavarian Reichswehr, which employed him as a contractor immediately after the war. Naturally, Hitler has to deny that his ideological fanaticism followed from personal opportunism. But “Mein Kampf” does not deny the strategic nature of the ideology of which the author has made himself the spokesman.

RelatedHitler's Noxious Plan to 'Restructure' Berlin

In consequence, Hitler’s look back at his years in Vienna serves two wholly different purposes. On the one hand, it is meant to obscure his much later — and much less ideologically commendable — calling as a political agitator. On the other hand, it tells political followers and allies, almost in textbook fashion, how to craft language suited for the masses: sharpen it to a single point and hold fast — “unwaveringly,” “with an iron will,” and so on.

“Mein Kampf” is constructed in such a way that confrontation with the Social Democrats and discussion of the “Jewish question” relate to each other as problem and solution. The treatment of the theme yields a kind of two-story structure. On the level of ideology, the essential message is that the eradication of Jewry — which is supposed to constitute the driving force behind capital and anticapitalism alike (conspiracy theories are confusing to the uninitiated) — will end class struggle as such. But in terms of party tactics, another aspect occupies the foreground — the demonization of political rivals who, in advancing partially similar sociopolitical measures, also claim to represent the masses. The narrative design of “Mein Kampf” is absolutely plain in this regard — and it is likely that the fact did not escape readers who were schooled in politics. On this level, attention does not fall on the what of ideology so much as the how of working it to propagandistic ends.

Evidence abounds that Hitler sought, above all, to address followers who were interested in the way that power is constituted [Machart von Macht]. For the narrower circle of his adherents, “Mein Kampf” provided a manual — which is also how such parties understood the book. Indeed, the very choice of this medium implies a practical orientation: Hitler thought that the effort required for reading would restrict the second, less obvious dimension of meaning to a select circle of likeminded individuals. Actual propaganda — Hitler leaves no room for doubt on this score — does not play out in the medium of writing but in declamatory agitation. Only an orator can instantly gauge the public’s reaction and adjust what he says accordingly, “until at length even the last group of an opposition, by its very bearing and facial expression, enables him to recognize its capitulation to his arguments”; only through speech, not written instruction, can the “resistance of emotions” be overcome.

On their own, these observations are not very original. Hitler hones them to make a point of significant import, however, when he declares that the effects of declamatory agitation provide the sole measure of their “truth.” An extended passage on the matter is revealing:

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. … The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.

Verification of the facts, nuance, decorum, and “criteria of humanitarianism and beauty” — in other words, all the guiding values of cultivated, bourgeois-academic discourse — are deemed irrelevant, consigned to a self-satisfied world apart, and subjected to ridicule. This anti-academic tone, which hands the “scientifically trained intelligentsia” over to open contempt, has nothing original about it, either. Hitler shares this view with a host of populist sectarians at the turn of the century, from whose writings he drew — parties who had forged an autodidactic and megalomaniacal counterworld to the sphere of professional academics. The credo of these “theoreticians of race and explainers of the world” held that conventional scientific or scholarly accuracy does not matter. With that, they made the intellectual edifice they tinkered together impervious to objections from academic experts. Moreover, the same means that sectarians use to seal themselves off into elitist circles can be struck into populist coin, provided it achieves resonance. Ultimately, it serves a large-scale political ideology that need not worry about being proven wrong so long as it continues to produce desired effects. When the “accuracy or inaccuracy of propaganda” is measured only in terms of “success,” it closes itself off into a tautological circle of self-verification: It garners belief because it presents itself as the truth, and it counts as true because the masses believe in it.

It is supposed to make “everyone … convinced that the fact is real”; therefore, it excludes debate of the matter’s merit — or lack thereof.

Here, a factor enters the equation that is consistently underestimated by those who view only error, blindness, or illusion at work in demagoguery — and, accordingly, seek to oppose it by means of reasonable objections. Counter to what such enlightened optimists believe, the demagogue — along with those in his train — usually knows full well what he is doing. He does not advance his claims in spite of the fact that they will offend reasonable people but because he can be sure to provoke them by doing so. The reflexive outrage he triggers does not unsettle him; rather, it affords him a kind of contemptuous exhilaration. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler openly declares that propaganda is a means to an end. It is supposed to make “everyone … convinced that the fact is real”; therefore, it excludes debate of the matter’s merit — or lack thereof. Propaganda’s “very first precondition,” according to Hitler, is a “basically subjective and one-sided attitude … toward every question it deals with.” Even though his rhetoric does not discount the truth as a category of appeal, in the broader context of everything else he writes, it represents a secondary consideration deriving from the power of speech itself — that is, something constituted in circular fashion by the efficacy and force of pure assertion.

When Hitler discusses the propagandistic fabrication of truth in the process of declamation, he elaborates a circular logic, too. The agitator, as described in “Mein Kampf,” entertains a direct connection to the feelings of the crowd that he is haranguing, and he seeks to absorb each and every swell of emotion. It is easy to picture how, during his early years in Munich, the author tested the guiding principles of his worldview for their rhetorical efficacy — until they finally seemed to be what the people actually believed. At the same time, Hitler stresses the need “to take a position in important questions of principle against all public opinion when it [assumes] a false attitude — disregarding all consideration of popularity, hatred, or struggle.” In other words, the Party is not allowed to subordinate itself to public opinion; it must command it. Here and elsewhere, Hitler formulates the matter in sexualized terms: “It must not become a servant of the masses but their master!” The point is not to subdue the audience by force, then, but to employ an imperious folksiness [Volkstümlichkeit] that is commensurate with the “feminine” disposition of the people — which must also be protected from “seducers” on the enemy side.

Albrecht Koschorke is Professor of German Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Konstanz. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago from 2004 to 2009. Koschorke is the author of “On Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” from which this article is excerpted.

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When Design Is the Problem

Responsible design thinking demands a balance between creating solutions and anticipating their future consequences.

Source image: SFIO CRACHO / Adobe Stock

By: Manuel Lima

9:57AM, 15 Jul, 2024

In 1842, more than 500 women died shortly after giving birth at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria. With over 3,000 births that year in the same hospital, this mortality rate was close to 16 percent. The cause of death had been known for many years, and it had killed thousands of women around the world.

This article is adapted from Manuel Lima’s book “The New Designer“

It went by different names, such as puerperal fever, the “black death of childbed,” or “the doctor’s plague.” Puerperal fever killed up to 25 percent of all women giving birth in 18th-century childbirth wards across Europe and America, but it was not caused by an unknown airborne virus or a global pandemic. Physicians who were determined to understand the cause noticed that women who gave birth at home had a considerably lower probability of contracting this fever, which was a curious and vexing fact for many prestigious hospital doctors. In 1843, one year after the fatal loss of those women in the hospital in Vienna, American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. published “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” an essay that identified the culprit of this plague — poor hygiene by doctors and nurses.

At that time, doctors traveled from one childbirth to the next without washing their hands, sometimes just after performing an autopsy — contaminated utensils, clothes, and all. Today, we call the “black death of childbed” simply postpartum infections. They assail a much smaller number of women, who can be treated with antibiotics and make a swift recovery in most cases.

The underlying message, according to British-American author Simon Sinek, who popularized this tale in one of his talks, is quite clear: Sometimes you are the problem.  When it comes to 18th-century puerperal fever, doctors were the problem. When it comes to our modern-day culture of waste, excess, and addiction, design is the problem.

We fetishize and worship the creation framework as if it’s the only thing that matters.

While designers are eager for praise and acclaim and create an aura of ostensibly cultured and intellectual pursuit, often involving awards and accolades, design itself takes no responsibility for what happens when things go wrong. But as Sinek points out, you cannot have credit without accountability. As with the doctors who saw no wrongdoing in their own behavior, so designers today turn a blind eye at their nefarious effect on the world. The difference, however, is that the doctors’ arrogance can be attributed to ignorance. After all, germ theory was just a theory back then. Hand washing didn’t seem like a logical solution to the problem. Today, designers cannot claim such obliviousness. To continue ignoring the repercussions they have on society and the environment is simply negligent. We must care as much about our impact as we care about all other design elements — the creative process and craft, quality and attention to detail, user needs and empathy. We need a conscientious design that understands and prioritizes positive impact.

One reason for this shortcoming is that designers continue to be trained not to see consequences. They don’t see the problem. We fetishize and worship the creation framework as if it’s the only thing that matters. Frameworks are an important tool in any discipline, yet they can also condition thought. If they are simultaneously skewed and prevalent, they can have a damaging effect. In 2002, the British Design Council introduced one of the most famous depictions of the design methodology: the double diamond. This diagram divides the design process into two diamonds, each with two linear phases. In the first diamond, discover and define are about identifying the problem, and in the second diamond, develop and deliver are about solution ideation and implementation. Over the past two decades, this simple model has become a universal reference for how design should operate and a symbol of the design thinking movement, influencing the corporate, nondesign world as well.

It is by no means the first attempt at visualizing the design process in an easily graspable diagram. One of the earliest models for the creative process was created by an English social psychologist and a cofounder of the London School of Economics in 1926. Graham Wallas introduced what later became known as the Wallas creativity process, a model of creativity comprising four stages — preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Since then, there has been a long succession of models and diagrams that have tried to bring a new perspective to the mix. In “Innovation Methods Mapping: Demystifying 80+ Years of Innovative Process Design,” GK VanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor, the cofounders of the design consultancy firm Humantific, collected and analyzed more than 60 innovation process diagrams produced between 1926 and 2014. While the diagrams most often had four, six, or eight steps, underlying most was a simple, archetypal, three-stage ideation process: Identify the problem, create the solution, and implement it. It is a straightforward recipe. There were a few other differences in approach, with some models showcasing a linear progression and others emphasizing ideas of iteration, repetition, and cyclicality.

One important finding in this analysis was that the creation stage appears to be the most prominent. This was the case for at least 48 diagrams. Most models appear holistic or balanced at first, but when looked at closely, it’s clear that there’s a strong weighting toward creation — toward defining and conceptualizing the solution rather than optimizing or delivering it, for instance. The overemphasis on design creation is symptomatic of a wider problem in design. It fuels the myth of the designer as the creative genius, the artist in disguise, while it downplays key design responsibilities. Another alarming insight from VanPatter and Pastor’s research is that only a handful of methods consider human behavior, such as recommended actions, techniques, or approaches. And just one includes a mention of human values. This oversight is disquieting. If all frameworks fail to accommodate desirable human values, then ethics, integrity, and responsibility are simply irrelevant factors in a design process. We are simply locked in an unseeing production cycle.

Anticipating what is yet to come must be part of your role as a designer.

However, the most important omission, which sits at the genesis of my book “The New Designer,” is that all models envision the design process as ending in the last stage — invariably labeled as delivery or implementation — as if there’s nothing else beyond that. This is where the work of a designer ends. And to many, so does their accountability. If we look back at the double diamond diagram, it is clearly incomplete. We are missing an equally important third diamond that comprehends the notion of effect and consequences. In the past, we shed a bright light on the first diamond and the need to understand the problem, but now we must become resourceful at deciphering an elusive third diamond on impact.

Anticipating what is yet to come must be part of your role as a designer. This means flying in the face of contemporary reality in order to dream the impossible and imagine the unimaginable. You can pay close attention to the work of design studios doing groundbreaking work in the domain of design fiction, such as Superflux and The Near Future Laboratory, to understand some of the methods and practices involved. Speculative design can still be a daring and challenging experience. If you are unable to work on foresight frequently, allow yourself, your team, or your organization to focus on occasional experimental projects.

One way to do this is to look at existing fringe technologies, products, or trends and hypothesize how they will evolve in the future. It can provide a series of meaningful scenarios that can be discussed and evaluated as a group. It can be a great exercise to do with your peers. We need that level of abstraction and open-endedness to develop our problem-solving skills. Ask the team to imagine there were no business or technological constraints and that they could simply start from scratch. What would they do differently? Start by asking, “What if?” This can be a liberating and energizing routine, and you might run into a speculative idea worth pursuing.

It’s time we step out of our simplistic problem-solution narrative and ask what lies beyond: What journey extends beyond delivery? Otherwise, we risk being as compliant to the status quo as 18th-century doctors were, failing to see that we ourselves are the problem. We cannot afford more design solutions carelessly thrown into a vacuum of consequences.

Manuel Lima is an internationally renowned designer and author of several books including “The Book of Circles,” “The Book of Trees,” “Visual Complexity,” and “The New Designer,” from which this article is adapted. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a regular lecturer at conferences around the world.

The MIT Press is a mission-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publisher. Your support helps make it possible for us to create open publishing models and produce books of superior design quality.

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Sex and 'Female Semen' in the Medieval Arab World

Stephanie Haerdle, author of “Juice,” explores medieval Islamic views on sex, including female ejaculation and the surprising role it played in conception theories.

A spread from Persian polymath and physician Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Rāzī 25-volume work “Kitāb al-Ḥāwī," one of the most important primary sources on contemporary sexual health practices.

By: Stephanie Haerdle

10:01AM, 11 Jul, 2024

For millennia, it’s understood that all humans produce semen, whatever their sex. Medieval Arabic literature and medical texts are filled with accounts of a generative female seed and women gushing fluids in moments of passion. Islamic scholars embrace theories of conception proposed by Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. The notion that both men and women play a part in procreation aligns with Islam. Surah 49 of the Holy Quran reads, “O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female.” Surah 76 states that man was created from a “drop of mingled sperm,” and the hadiths explain that women also contribute semen to conception. How else to explain the fact — and we’ve heard this argument before — that daughters and sons resemble their mother?

This article is excerpted from Stephanie Haerdle’s book “Juice: A History of Female Ejaculation“

Eminent medieval physicians like Avicenna (that is, Abū Alī al-Husain ibn Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā) or Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya subscribe to the Hippocratic or Galenic two-seed theory. Avicenna (ca. 980–1037), the Persian doctor and philosopher, describes healthy female semen as glistening and whitish, with the scent of palm blossoms and elderberry. There are echoes of Aristotle in Avicenna’s characterization of female seed as thinner, weaker, and more blood-like than male semen. The female fluid readies things for the fetus and then empties into the vagina, where it mixes with male ejaculate before being sucked back into the uterus. Experienced at once, these various sensations — the flow of seed, burst of male fluid, and uterine sucking action— are enough to trigger climax in women.

Avicenna is confronted with an obvious conundrum: Why do some women conceive without having orgasmed? How can pregnancy occur without female seed? The doctor riddles it out: whenever a woman becomes pregnant without having ejaculated, it’s because fresh male seed has fertilized older female semen still found in the uterus. If a man is fundamentally unable to please his wife in bed, the union will remain childless; a small penis is often to blame for infertility, Avicenna explains, because a woman is less likely to experience pleasure in intercourse, such that she does not ejaculate, and if she does not ejaculate, he concludes, there can be no child. There are serious consequences when a woman doesn’t ejaculate. Issues can also arise if she ejaculates, but her semen goes unfertilized and forms abnormal masses in the uterus. These tumors result from masturbation or nocturnal emissions; it is a truth acknowledged by old Arabic physicians and scholars, too, that women experience wet dreams.

It is a truth acknowledged by old Arabic physicians and scholars that women experience wet dreams.

Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1351), born in Damascus, believes that male and female seminal fluids are matched in generative power, but differ in other respects. Female semen is yellowish and thin. Rather than spurting, it flows from the body — if at all. There is the notion that, although required for conception, female semen stays in the body. In “The Treatise on Anatomy of Human Body and Interpretation of Philosophers” (1632), Šams ad-dīn al-Itāqī vividly depicts the movement of female semen within the body. The fluid is “yellow like cold mild [sic]” and contained in the uterus, where it mixes with male semen—“white and heavy like the rennet” — during coitus: “The male semen has the power of formation and the female semen provides substance. When they are united, harmony appears.”

Islamic jurisprudence is influenced by the belief that male and female semen contribute to conception. Legal scholar and theologian Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) argues that coitus interruptus (or azl) is necessarily permissible (mubah) and contraception does not contravene religious precepts. In one of the “most remarkable documents in the history of birth control,” al-Ghazālī reasons that a fetus doesn’t form until male and female seeds have mixed in the uterus. Whereas aborting a fetus constitutes a crime against a living being, preventing pregnancy or withdrawing the penis before ejaculation does not. On its own, male semen is nugatory. Any form of contraception that prevents fluids from interacting, whether barrier methods or coitus interruptus, is therefore allowed. Several scholars even sanction (male) masturbation since male semen isn’t particularly valuable.

Old Arabic texts do not, however, explain how a woman might curb her seminal emissions to avoid pregnancy. Is there an equivalent to coitus interruptus or coitus reservatus in women? “Kitāb al-Ḥāwī” is a monumental medical and pharmaceutical encyclopedia composed in the 10th century by Persian polymath and physician Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Rāzī. The 25-volume work, a detailed survey of knowledge from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, is one of the most important primary sources on contemporary sexual health practices. “Al–Ḥāwī” alone contains 176 remedies related to conception and abortion, including orally ingested physics, magical tonics, barrier methods (e.g., tampons prepared with honey, pepper, peppermint oil, or dill), such male practices as rubbing the penis in pine tar or balsam oil prior to intercourse, and techniques used primarily by women. Only once, though, does “Al-Ḥāwī” state that pregnancy can be prevented by a man’s climaxing first, thus denying his lover her own orgasmic expulsion. Medical figures like Avicenna and Abu al-Hasan al-Tabari adopt al-Rāzī’s idea before this method of contraception vanishes from the literature.

Amīn-ad-Daula Abu-‘l-Faraǧ ibn Yaʻqūb ibn Isḥāq Ibn al-Quff al-Karaki (1233–1286) authors one of the few Arabic monographs on surgery. In “Basics in the Art of Surgery,” Ibn al-Quff presents his ideas on female semen and uterine anatomy. Following Galen, he interprets female genitalia as male genitalia. Women are colder than men, he states, which is why their reproductive organs are located inside the body, and their seed is thinner and less abundant. Female semen, Ibn al-Quff continues, streams into the uterus from the testicles: “Each ‘testicle’ (baiḍatān) is connected to the uterus by a channel (mağran), along which the [female] semen flows. This is known as the seminal sling (qāḏif al-minā).”

A more literary take on female seed can be found in “The Perfumed Garden,” a 15th-century sex manual by Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad an-Nafzāwī. Like their Indian predecessors, this and other textbooks explain the ins and outs of lovemaking and personal hygiene, but include erotic poems and tales as well. The opening lines of “The Perfumed Garden” celebrate the Creator and physical desire in both men and women:

Praise be given to God, who has placed man’s greatest pleasure in the natural parts of woman, and has destined the natural parts of man to afford the greatest enjoyment to woman.

He has not endowed the parts of woman with any pleasurable or satisfactory feeling until the same have been penetrated by the instrument of the male; and likewise the sexual organs of man know neither rest nor quietness until they have entered those of the female.

The book outlines sexual techniques and problems, discloses sources of pleasure and displeasure, provides treatments for female infertility, and explains how to end a pregnancy. A “meritorious man” will be endowed with a “strong, vigorous and hard” member, “not quick to discharge.” Premature ejaculation and quickies are considered unfeeling. Foreplay is key (“toy with her previous to the coition; prepare her for the enjoyment, and neglect nothing to attain that end”), essential to making both lovers’ fluids “flow over at the same time.”

Old Arabic texts introduce medieval Europe to the significance of foreplay, kissing, and pillow talk.

Old Arabic texts introduce medieval Europe to the significance of foreplay, kissing, and pillow talk. According to Muslim sexology of the time, female desire and orgasm are essential, and ought not to hinge on male orgasm. The idea that a man should tend to female desire, to allow for a woman to reach climax, was missing in Greek and Roman cultures, writes modern-day Islamic theologian Ali Ghandour. In his 2019 study of “Muslims’ suppressed erotic heritage,” Ghandour quotes a 10th-century text: “Know that the man most loved among women is he who knows how to behave toward them and fulfill their [wishes].” The most important trait a man can have is the ability to recognize female desire and know how to satisfy it.

“The Perfumed Garden” states that when a man dreams of a woman’s vulva — feurdj, or “slit” — it means “if he is in trouble God will free him of it; if he is in a perplexity he will soon get out of it,” grow wealthy, and settle his debts. Even “more lucky” is to dream of an open vulva. “The Perfumed Garden” describes female genitalia in rich, if ambiguous and uneven, terms: “El maoui (the juicy).—The vagina thus named has one of the four most abominable defects which can affect a vagina; nay, the most repulsive of all, for the too great abundance of secretions detracts from the pleasures of coition. This imperfection grows still worse when the man by preliminary caresses provokes the issue of the moisture. God preserve us from them! Amen.” The “biter,” meanwhile, is a vulva that “opens and shuts again” on the penis shortly before orgasm. The “large one” is a “vulva which is as wide as it is long . . . , fully developed all round, from side to side, and from the pubis to the perineum. It is the most beautiful to look upon.” Here too, seminal emissions are part of female orgasm: “Then do all you can to provoke a simultaneous discharge of the two spermal fluids; herein lies the secret of love.” In one story, a “profound connoisseur in love affairs” explains that “in acting thus, the two ejaculations take place simultaneously, and the enjoyment comes to the man and woman at the same moment. Then the man feels the womb grasping his member, which gives to each of them the most exquisite pleasure.”

Stephanie Haerdle is the author of “Keine Angst haben, das ist unser Beruf!

Kunstreiterinnen, Dompteusen und andere Zirkusartistinnen” (Not Being Afraid Is Our Job! Circus Riders, Animal Tamers and Other Female Circus Performers) and “Juice: A History of Female Ejaculation,” from which this article is excerpted.

The MIT Press is a mission-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publisher. Your support helps make it possible for us to create open publishing models and produce books of superior design quality.

Donate

The Man Who Invented Times Square: O.J. Gude and the Birth of the Spectacular

Times Square's fame owes itself to a lucky twist of urban design and a charismatic promotional genius.

Gude's elaborate block-long Wrigley's Spearmint sign was one of his most memorable spectaculars, boasting more than 17,000 white and multicolored bulbs (pictured in 1917). Source: William D. Hassler Photographic Collection, New-York Historical Society.

By: Lynne B. Sagalyn

10:12AM, 8 Jul, 2024

They have reigned as the star attraction, always — the flashing, pulsating, sometimes disorienting messages radiating in all directions from the supersized signs in Times Square. As this illuminated theater of American commerce evolved over time, it shaped an imagistic personality for the district, one that thoroughly embodied the theatricality of the place. It was not a place of subtlety. The outside space was a fantastical show — a visual maelstrom free to all who came, ever changing moment by moment. Constantly heightened by the ambition of successive innovators abetted by advances in display technology, the robust energy and dynamism of the commercial culture of Times Square brought into being a singular place where advertising spectacle became entertainment, where private interests transformed an open space into an arena for visual pleasure of enduring appeal to tourists and locals alike.

This article is adapted from Lynne Sagalyn’s book “Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change“

Times Square owes much of its storied history to a physical anomaly: the bowtie configuration of streets created by Broadway’s diagonal intersection with Seventh Avenue. The geometry of this space with its twin goalposts of visibility at either end formed a natural stage for the theatricality of bright lights. The long sight lines along Broadway and Seventh Avenue are exceptional. Walled by theaters, restaurants, retail shops, and small business buildings, the open space was “especially well-suited for squinting at signs,” writes Sandy Isenstadt in his book on the architecture of electric light. Before they were replaced by office towers, the rooftops of two- and three-story buildings were easily transformed into sky-hugging metal frameworks for mounting supersized billboards and flashing signs that drew pedestrians to the square. From the center of the bowtie at 45th Street, “looking either north or south, the space opens up like the field of vision itself. With signs situated on façades or rooftop scaffolds, views were encircling and unimpeded,” Isenstadt explains. It “resembled an arena, though inverted, with the audience at the center and the performance along the periphery.”

“Everybody must read them, and absorb them, and absorb the advertiser’s lesson willingly or unwillingly”

The Times Square bowtie offered advertisers a perfect showcase — a generous physical space tailor-made for product ads — and it would not take long for the nation’s commercial purveyors to understand its potential, especially after electricity supplanted gaslit signs. Broadway was New York’s first electrified street (1890), and soon the dark, off-putting urban nighttime was being transformed into a sparkling environment of incandescent lights. But it took the entrepreneurial actions of Oscar J. Gude to make Times Square the most dramatic gathering place of all.

Gude invented the “spectacular,” an enormous electric sign consisting of hundreds of light bulbs wired to elaborate circuits which dictated animation patterns and different lighting effects. The goal was to stop people in their tracks, to sell through entertainment. Electric advertising “literally forces its announcement on the vision of the uninterested as well as the interested passerby,” he said. “Everybody must read them, and absorb them, and absorb the advertiser’s lesson willingly or unwillingly.”  By 1913, Times Square dazzled with hundreds of thousands of bright lights, emitting an intense glow that gave the district its nickname, “The Great White Way.” (The slogan, attributed to Gude, conveniently omits the fact that the blazing canyon of lights included many signs with colored as well as white lights.)

This view of Times Square looking north illustrates the long sightlines of the bowtie and O. J. Gude’s positioning of his Trimble Whiskey spectacular at 47th Street for maximum display (pictured in 1904). The sign was quickly replaced by a sign for a rival whiskey brand, Sanderson’s. By the early 1910s, the owners of the Studebaker building realized it was more profitable to lease their roof for spectaculars and replaced their discrete sign with a huge scaffold for mounting higher signs at this strategic site.

Drawing huge crowds of lingering, gaping consumers, Gude’s spectaculars were legendary. His first — the Trimble Whiskey sign (1904), placed at the central triangular block at 47th Street for maximum display — was visible for many blocks. The combination of Gude’s marketing brilliance and his creative designers produced a “constantly changing roster of enormous moving light displays in the sky about the square. Within a few years,” Darcy Tell wrote in “Times Square Spectacular: Lighting up Broadway,” “Gude almost single-handedly transformed Times Square into America’s most important outdoor advertising market.”  Between 1904 and 1917, his company put up approximately 20 large spectaculars in Times Square, each more elaborate and dazzling than its predecessor.

A charismatic promotional genius, Gude was the son of immigrant parents from Germany who started as a sign hanger and bill poster, before opening his own outdoor advertising business in 1889 to design marketing campaigns for corporate clients selling branded commodities. His success built on aggressive salesmanship combined with high-quality visual images. In a strategic maneuver, he bypassed local business and went directly to national companies when looking for clients, convincing them that a properly placed sign would reach a huge audience of entertainment seekers coming to Times Square on foot or by the new subway at 42nd Street. He gained control of a network of the most visible rooftops around the square, and with his designers applied technological breakthroughs of the day that allowed groups of connected bulbs to be turned on and off in sequence and lights to be dimmed or raised.

The father of sign spectaculars, O. J. Gude, brought visual life to a troupe of corporate brands during the first decades of the 20th century displayed in this advertisement, 1913. O. J. Gude Co.

The result was cinemalike actions in lights: A girl performed stunts on an electric tightrope. A polo player galloped on a horse and wacked a ball in an arc above Broadway. Boys boxed in their underwear. The signs promoted almost every product imaginable: safety razors, dental cream, cars, tires, bran flakes, coffee, whiskey, gin, cigarettes, chewing gum, movies and shows, gloves, and underwear, among many others.

Gude’s truly memorable and remarkable (and expensive) spectaculars came to dominate the growing nightscape of the square: the “coyly erotic” Miss Heatherbloom (1905), the 50-foot Petticoat Girl, who struggles under an umbrella in an electric rainstorm as her dress whips up to reveal her petticoat and shapely legs; the frolicking Corticelli Kitten (1912) tangling with a spool of thread in different locations; the flowing fountains of sparkling White Rock Table Water (1915) glittering in changing pastels; and one of the square’s longest-running spectaculars, the block-long Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum sign (1917–1923) atop the Putnam Building, a six-story office building on the west side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th Streets built by the Astor Estate in 1909. This was Gude’s most elaborate animation: 70 feet (eight stories) high and 250 feet long, boasting more than 17,000 white and multicolored lamps with flowing fountains, peacocks with 60-foot-long tails, flora and foliate motifs, and six prancing Spearmen, each measuring 15 feet high, who went through 12 calisthenics, which the public promptly dubbed the “Daily Dozen.” More than the flavor of gum, the brand itself was being advertised. “The largest electric sign in the world advertises WRIGLEY’S. . . . The sign is seen nightly,” its 1920 advertisement boasted, “by approximately 500,000 people, from all over the world” passing through Times Square.

Postcard view of a second full-block Wrigley’s spectacular on the east side of Broadway from 44th to 45th Street above the International Casino. This sign lasted from 1936 to 1960, with a brief hiatus during World War II (pictured in 1936). Collection of the author.

The mystique behind outdoor advertisements aimed to evoke something beyond the prosaic commodity. For White Rock Ginger Ale, “the water for all time” (1910), Gude designed a large clock that changed color every few seconds bracketed by flowing fountains of light. “The flowing fountains and colorful lights of the White Rock sign suggested that Times Square was an exotic and magical paradise existing outside the constraints of everyday life,” wrote the curator for the wall panel in the New-York Historical Society’s 1997 exhibition Signs and Wonders. The use of color, light, and exotic motifs was a popular device in stores, restaurants, and nightclubs. “Using these devices in advertisements imbued products with a mystique . . . and suggested that consumers could obtain that exoticism by purchasing the product.”

Gude’s White Rock Water spectacular at the north end of the Times Square bowtie, as presented in a Theatre Magazine advertisement, 1912. Wallach Division Picture Collection, The New York Public Library.

Never subtle, the commercial bottom-line aesthetic that came to define Times Square was not appreciated by the city’s elite or by civic organizations promoting the “City Beautiful.” They railed against “sign evil” — a growing aesthetic problem of large-scale billboards proliferating indiscriminately all over the city since the turn of the century. Sufficiently powerful, the public outcry convinced Mayor William J. Gaynor (1910–1913) to appoint a Billboard Advertising Commission (1913) to investigate the problem and issue recommendations, which it did, though none were adopted. “The ubiquity of these advertisements is an aggravating phase of the situation,” the commission’s report complained. “They are no respecters of place. They are not confined to the unimproved tracts and rubbish yards on the outskirts of the City. On the contrary, they are thrust into the finest vistas which our public places present.”  Of course, that would be where the most eyeballs would see them.

Never subtle, the commercial bottom-line aesthetic that came to define Times Square was not appreciated by the city’s elite or by civic organizations.

Fast forward to the 1920s. However much the businessmen and merchants of Broadway were benefiting from the economic power of the effusion of color and light that brought thousands upon thousands to Times Square, the same anti-billboard forces pressed on. “Throughout the twenties,” historian William Leach explained, “a battle was waged in Manhattan between rival trade associations over signage restrictions. On one side was the Broadway Association, which wanted no controls whatsoever placed on signage; on the other side was the grandiose and aggressive Fifth Avenue Association.” Fearing that the electric signs would spill out of Times Square, where they had been allowed under the city’s new zoning ordinance of 1916, the Fifth Avenue Association fought for control from 1916 onward, insisting that all projecting and illuminated signs be banned on Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to 110th Street.

The merchants of Fifth Avenue “wanted the patronage of the tourists who were attracted to New York by the lights of Times Square; and they certainly had nothing against commercial light and color.” What they did not want was a “‘carnival spectacle’ that might bring an influx of the ‘wrong kind of people’ into the Avenue on a daily basis, an influx that might jeopardize real estate values and undermine the control these merchants had over their property.” In 1922, the Fifth Avenue merchants succeeded in convincing the Board of Alderman to pass an ordinance that put strict controls on signage everywhere around Times Square, which had the effect of intensifying the glitter and concentrating it in that one sanctioned area, where it would have a “carnival field day.”

Decade after decade the intense illumination of commercial signs in Times Square speaks to the magical energy of the city, the serendipitous encounters among strangers mesmerized by the scope and vitality of New York. It is a strand of the city’s DNA, the embodiment of its distinctive commercial energy — rooted in an ability to innovate beyond what proved successful before.

Lynne B. Sagalyn is Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor Emerita of Real Estate at Columbia Business School, as well as a real estate professional. She is the author of “Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan,” “Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon,” and “Times Square Remade: The Dynamics of Urban Change,” from which this article is adapted.

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How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism

Robert Barsky examines the profound impact of Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" on Noam Chomsky's early embrace of left-libertarian and anarchist ideologies.

By: Robert F. Barsky

10:08AM, 3 Jul, 2024

Unlike the many members of the left who captivated him as a young man — such as Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell — Noam Chomsky himself did not come to left-libertarian or anarchist thinking as a result of his disillusionment with liberal thought. He quite literally started there. At a tender age, he had begun his search for information on contemporary left-libertarian movements, and did not abandon it. Among those figures he was drawn to, George Orwell is especially fascinating, both because of the impact that he had on a broad spectrum of society and the numerous contacts and acquaintances he had in the libertarian left. Chomsky refers to Orwell frequently in his political writings, and when one reads Orwell’s works, the reasons for his attraction to someone interested in the Spanish Civil War from an anarchist perspective become clear.

This article is excerpted from Robert F. Barsky’s biography of Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent“

When Chomsky was in his teens he read Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “which,” he told me in 1995, “struck me as amusing but pretty obvious”; but in his later teens he read “Homage to Catalonia” “and thought it outstanding (though he overdid the POUM role I felt, not surprisingly given where he was); it confirmed beliefs I already had about the Spanish Civil War.” “Homage to Catalonia,” Orwell’s description of the Spanish conflict, which he wrote after completing a stint as an active member of the POUM militia, is still a book to which people (including Chomsky) who are interested in successful socialist or anarchist movements refer, because it gives an accurate and moving description of a working libertarian society. The “beliefs” that it “confirmed” for the teenaged Chomsky were related to his growing conviction that libertarian societies could function and meet the needs of the individual and the collective.

There were three left-wing groups active on the scene in Barcelona during the 1930s: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or POUM; the socialist PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalunya), which was dominated by Stalinists; and the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores-Federacion Anarquista Iberica), which honored Rudolf Rocker as “their teacher” on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Orwell joined the POUM militia at the end of 1936 as a means of entering Spain to write newspaper articles. His description, in “Homage to Catalonia,” of the POUM line sets up an oversimplified but provocative relationship between bourgeois democracy, fascism, and capitalism:

Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. The war and the revolution are inseparable.

Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II. This concept is a difficult one to grasp for those of us who have been programmed, in large measure by the mainstream press, to think that battles must involve two opposing forces — one good and one evil. World War II is often portrayed this way: the Allied side is taken to represent freedom and democracy, while fascism and Nazism are considered synonymous with totalitarian oppression. Chomsky knew early on that there were other ways to conceive of contemporary political structures. He tended to lean towards the left-libertarian interpretation of events, and concluded that neither side deserved the support of those interested in a “good society.” How “good” is the society that drops atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, or reduces German towns to rubble? Isn’t there an alternative?

How “good” is the society that drops atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, or reduces German towns to rubble? Isn’t there an alternative?

This subject is still hotly debated, even among members of the libertarian left. Norman Epstein, who has been active in leftist movements for many years and who is otherwise generally sympathetic to Chomsky’s position, here dissents by taking exception to Orwell’s paraphrasing of the POUM line. He emphasizes that “fascism is not simply another name for capitalism. It is a form, and a particularly brutal one, which capitalism takes under certain historical circumstances (including today in many third world countries under the sponsorship of U.S. capital) which is different from bourgeois democracy. Someone like Chomsky is allowed to function under bourgeois democracy but not under fascism.” But we must recognize the similarities between a fascist agenda and that of the so-called democratic West if we are to understand where Chomsky is coming from in his political works, and to do so we have to engage with the anarchist position that he had begun to develop in his youth.

The most important point, perhaps, is that the anarchism of the type that reigned, in various degrees, in Barcelona in the 1930s, was not an anarchism of chaos, of random acts; it was not purely individualistic or hedonistic in character. When Chomsky considered the anarchist position as an alternative to the status quo, he may well have appealed to Orwell’s description, in “Homage to Catalonia,” of Barcelona in 1936. He refers to this passage on a number of occasions in his later works. Orwell begins by describing his arrival in the city, noting the physical changes that had been effected by the anarchists and the workers. Most of the buildings had been seized by the workers, churches had been gutted or demolished, there were no private motorcars or taxis, shops and cafes had been collectivized, and symbols of the revolution abounded. But it was the effect that this collectivization had upon the people that was most striking.

Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted”; everyone called everyone else “Comrade” and “Thou,” and said “Salud!” instead of “Buenos dias.” … And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no “welldressed” people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I didn’t understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

But how does one achieve such a society? How did the young Chomsky explain to himself the great distance between his own world and the one about which he read in books such as “Homage to Catalonia”? And why didn’t he look to the Bolshevists rather than the anarchists?

The work of anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker was a vital source of information and inspiration for him as he struggled to analyze these complex issues. Chomsky read Rocker’s work, including his book on the Spanish Civil War called “The Tragedy of Spain,” as a teenager. Rocker’s argument was that the Bolshevist rulers justified totalitarian practices by claiming to defend proletarian interests against counterrevolutionary actions. They were preparing society for socialism in accord with the teaching of Lenin. But Rocker’s claim, which is in line with Chomsky’s thinking, is that dictatorship and tyranny, even when couched in apparently libertarian ideology and objectives, can never lead to liberation. Says Rocker: “What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to their blind followers that the much vaunted ‘necessity of dictatorship’ is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the workers and the peasants.” The importance of the Spanish revolution is clear, for it served as a concrete example of how powers such as the Soviet Union and the United States, despite their apparent differences, did converge in their mutual fear of liberation movements. In this sense, apparent aberrations such as the Stalinist-Fascist pact that was signed on August 23, 1939, or the physical and verbal attacks made against the Spanish anarchists by both the Soviets and the Americans, make sense. The misrepresentation of events persists even today in standard historical texts.

Chomsky was fortunate to have made this connection early on, for it spared him from experiencing the disillusionment that ultimately afflicted many of his contemporaries. This sense of betrayal or surprise was very real for many members of Chomsky’s generation. His friend Seymour Melman, for example, described in a personal interview the important role that the Spanish Civil War played in revealing to him the Stalinist Fascist relationship and the so-called Communist hand:

We didn’t know the full role of the Communists until 1939 when this famous Russian general defected and wrote articles in the Saturday Evening Post. Therein he described in detail how Stalin was using his secret police to wage a war against the Anarchists. He described Stalin’s war within the war. He also described how the Stalinists stole the gold reserve of the Spanish Republic. He layed out a detailed analysis and prediction of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Notice the time lag between the events of 1936 and the realization that the Soviets were “wag[ing] a war against the Anarchists.” Even more remarkable, of course, is that the generally accepted view, subsequently perpetrated by the Western press, was that the Spanish Civil War was a colossal failure, and had achieved no concrete results. It was branded as a failure of socialist, anarchist, or Marxist principles, depending upon who was doing the branding.

Orwell had noted, in “Homage to Catalonia,” the obvious schism between the events as they occurred and as they were reported, and pointed to the way in which media types and intellectuals tended to dismiss anti-status-quo movements, such as socialism, by distorting the principles that supported them or the movements that grew from them: “I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country of the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this.”

This is the crux of the matter; other visions did exist, and Chomsky had access to them as a young man. But it did take a certain amount of effort to uncover them, unless one was fortunate enough to have participated directly in events of the time, as Orwell was. “[I]t was here that those few months in the POUM militia were valuable to me,” he writes. “For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me.”

Robert F. Barsky is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow & Professor at Vanderbilt University. He has published widely in language theory, literary studies, and border studies with an emphasis on humanistic approaches to human rights. He is the author of several books, including “The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower” and “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent,” from which this article is excerpted.

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Mind-Reading and Neuroplasticity: In Conversation With Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone

“The brain is never the same from one moment to the next throughout life. Never ever.”

Source: Nomad_Soul via Adobe Stock

By: Adolfo Plasencia

10:09AM, 1 Jul, 2024

On the wall opposite Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s birth house, on a street in Valencia where the now Harvard-based behavioral neurologist spent his childhood, stands a marble plaque that reads: “In this house lived the distinguished researcher Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who began his histological work here.” In that house, the great scientist and Nobel Prize winner began sketching ideas that would later form the basis of his foundational text in the field of histology, “Manual de Histología normal y de técnica micrográfica.” Every time I see my friend Alvaro, I think about that serendipitous encounter.

I associate that connection with a powerful feeling I experienced some time ago at the Green Building on the MIT campus. One afternoon, a kind professor buzzed me into an office on the 12th floor to take a photo of the campus from the north face of that iconic skyscraper designed by I. M. Pei. Crossing a large office to reach the window, I had to maneuver around a beautiful hardwood table. With the photo snapped, I retraced my steps, transfixed on that table. “Do you know why we take such good care of it?” the professor asked with a smile. “Because on that very table,” he explained, “our great Edward Lorenz wrote the nuclear part of the theory of strange attractors and founded his Chaos Theory.” Science wonk that I am, I was paralyzed for an instant by emotion. Seeing my surprise, he explained that they’d left it exactly as Lorenz had it before he died.

Teenage Alvaro’s daily routine for years involved walking past the house of Ramón y Cajal. Could young Alvaro’s daily encounters with Ramón y Cajal’s house have subtly influenced his path? The idea, a sort of strange attractor itself, is intriguing. But who’s to say? I know it’s far-fetched, but the way it resonates with Pascual-Leone’s lifelong dedication to Ramón y Cajal’s work holds a certain charm. With that, let’s dive into a bit of a conversation he and I had earlier this year, which he kindly allowed me to share.

Adolfo Plasencia: Alvaro, your pioneering work on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) — which for our readers is just what it sounds like: using magnets to stimulate the human brain — has opened doors to exciting possibilities in brain research and treatment, particularly for conditions like depression and chronic pain. How has the field evolved since you began your journey?

Alvaro Pascual-Leone: In our now 20-year-old book on TMS, Vincent Walsh and I explicitly argue that sometimes innovations in certain technologies force a conceptual breakthrough. That is, simply, what has happened with transcranial magnetic stimulation from then until now. For a much deeper discussion around the principles and modern applications of TMS, I’d direct readers to this recent discussion.

The most striking thing for me is that when you read Cajal, von Monakow, or Wernicke, you are surprised by the notions they described long ago. But now we can accurately measure what they sensed because we have great specific technologies for that. They were pioneering intuitions that in part had been forgotten, perhaps because they were untested (or not fully testable) hypotheses and by some considered not to be neuroscience. But the fact is that they offered the very foundation of critical insights on brain function we have since rediscovered. Now that we have access to new and evolved technologies, it forces us to reevaluate those theories and allows us to push the theoretical foundations forward.

Adolfo: Your more recent reflections on brain plasticity, particularly how it shapes our perception of time due to the brain’s constant remodeling, caught my attention. Can you elaborate on how this plasticity specifically influences our sense of time?

Alvaro: Time is an aspect, a component, essential to understanding the human brain. It’s often not sufficiently considered because it adds a dimension that makes it more complex. And, as you know, we humans tend to simplify. But I think the philosophy of Heraclitus’s Panta Rei (everything flows) describes precisely what happens in the nervous system. The brain is never the same from one moment to the next throughout life. Never ever. That is the first law.

“My now and your now are at best hundreds of milliseconds out of phase and thus ‘present’ is effectively not a shared reality between the two of us.”

The second law: The brain never goes back. It never undoes the path it has walked. First and foremost, because there is no such path. The poet Antonio Machado was right when he wrote that “there is no path, the path is made by walking.” There is no mechanism to un-beat the beaten egg, so to speak. Once something is learned or experienced, it can’t be erased. What does exist is the possibility of making a change with which you functionally “go back” to a state like the one you had before. The outcome might be the same, but the brain uses a different pathway to get there. It is a change that makes the representation of what appears functionally the same, in reality, turn out to be different. That is, you cannot redo or retake the trace you had, but you can make a new trace. This principle, where the outcome remains similar but the underlying process changes, is a hallmark of the brain’s remarkable plasticity.

The third law — the third reality — is that time in the brain is a very particular thing because “now” does not really exist. I may be saying “now,” but I’ve already thought about it and, in the best case, it has taken me 30 milliseconds to finish that processing and send the message to my larynx to come out. So, I thought it and then I said it with a time lag. And you heard it and it has taken you at least another 30 milliseconds to integrate it and process it, and then another 30 milliseconds to decode it. So mine is not the “now” that I am telling you, but that of 30 milliseconds ago. You get the idea. My now and your now are at best hundreds of milliseconds out of phase and thus “present” is effectively not a shared reality between the two of us.

This very curious reality, according to which we think we are in the present, but actually that present does not exist in a neurobiological sense, is explained very well by Bill Bryson in his book “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.” He illustrates well this paradox that time is essential while at the same time illusory and elusive.

Adolfo: Apropos of all this, the engineer and neuroscientist José M. Carmena, in my collection of discussions with scientists (in which you also participate), argues that the brain creates consciousness, which is an illusion. However, according to him, it is a fictitious illusion. Philosopher Javier Echeverría applauds this assertion but warns him that this statement will get him into trouble with phenomenologists and Kantians. They will accept, according to Echeverría, that consciousness is an illusion, but they will not accept that consciousness is a fictitious illusion fabricated by the brain itself.

Alvaro: I agree with José. I think the brain works by creating hypotheses about what it is going to find and then it contrasts those hypotheses with what it actually finds. It is not a receptive chamber of information. It is an active projection that it compares with the reality it encounters.

Adolfo: You began a recent lecture by saying, “When I started this lecture, you had your brain in one way, and when I finish it, and you have listened to me, you will have it in another way.” In other words, we have to understand the brain not as something static but as something dynamic in a process of continuous change.

Alvaro: Yes, that’s right. Everything we do, think, and experience changes our brain.

Adolfo: Let me now introduce an adjacent topic. Brain technologies, or so-called neurotechnologies, are regularly used to manage or treat persistent diseases like epilepsy, depression, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. You yourself use these technologies in your lab. But as with any powerful tool, there’s always the risk of bad actors misusing it. A few years ago Politico published a chilling article that captured the emerging fear of brain privacy invasion. The headline: “Machines can read your brain. There’s little you can do to stop them.” In the face of all this, a growing movement is emerging that brings together neuroscientists, philosophers, lawyers, human rights defenders, and policymakers who are rushing to try to protect that last frontier of privacy.

But technologies are evolving at an enormous speed. In December, a group of Australian researchers demonstrated a “mind-reading” system called BrainGPT. Essentially they connect a multitasking EEG encoder to an LLM capable of decoding coherent and readable sentences from EEG signals. BrainGPT can, according to its creators, convert thoughts (recorded with a non-invasive electrode helmet) into words that are displayed on a screen. Alvaro, I need a reality check. What can actually be read today in the brain, and to what extent? Are there ways to protect the privacy of the brain from this, and how can we protect ourselves from the invasiveness of these machines?

Alvaro: The reality is that the ability to read the brain and influence activity is already here. It’s no longer only in the realm of science fiction. Now, the question is, what exactly can we access and manipulate in the brain? Consider this example: If I instruct you to move a hand, I can tell if you are preparing to move, say, your right hand. I can even administer a precise “nudge” to your brain and make you move your right hand faster. And you would then claim, and fully believe, that you moved it yourself. However, I know that, in fact, it was me who moved it for you. I can even force you to move your left hand — which you were not going to move — and lead you to rationalize why you changed your mind when in fact, our intervention led to that action you perceive as your choice. We have done this experiment in our laboratory.

“I can even force you to move your left hand — which you were not going to move — and lead you to rationalize why you changed your mind.”

In humans, we can modify brain activity by reading and writing in the brain, so to speak, though we can affect only very simple things right now. In animals, we can do much more complex things because we have much more precise control of the neurons and their timing. But the capacity for that modulation of smaller circuits progressively down to individual neurons in humans is going to come, including much more selective modification with optogenetic alternatives — that is, using light to control the activity of neurons. Therefore, something that we should be very clear about as a society and as human beings is what regulations and criteria we should develop so that their use is appropriate — and beneficial — for the individual and not just a source of profit or power. I welcome this movement in favor of neuroethics and its application to neurological techniques because I think it is crucial.

Adolfo: Last year, I attended an open session organized in Valencia by the Consell Valenciá de Cultura. You shared the stage with your colleague Rafael Yuste, director of the NeuroTechnology Center (NTC) at Columbia University and co-founder of The NeuroRights Foundation. At the meeting, the Declaration on Neurorights of Valencia was unveiled. This Declaration asserts that neurorights must be included in the universal list of human rights. Why do you think neurorights are important and necessary for our present and immediate future life?

Alvaro: I think Rafa Yuste has articulated the challenge, the problem, and the need very well. I think we already have technology that allows us to read and write in the brain, extract information from our brain and manage it in a way that could compromise, at least potentially, the independence, privacy, and agency of each of us.

Adolfo: You refer to the ability to make decisions and the choices that make up and allow free will, right?

Alvaro: Exactly. That’s what I mean by agency. The assertive ability, in the first place, to do and decide for oneself. Anything that interferes with that poses a potential risk to the very essence of human rights. In other words, a new list of human rights would have to be developed and expanded by Neurorights. They need to be expanded, as the current ones fall short and do not sufficiently protect against the possibility of information extraction, manipulation, and personal control to which today’s neurotechnology can already give rise. I have joined in because I believe they are a necessary extension. Neurorights will be fundamental in the societies of the future.

Adolfo Plasencia is a science writer and the author of “Is the Universe a Hologram? Scientists Answer the Most Provocative Questions.”

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The Tyranny of the Template: The Graphic Design of the First Edition of ‘Learning From Las Vegas’

Pioneering architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown looks back at the creative battle behind a book that redefined architectural thinking.

By: Denise Scott Brown

10:12AM, 26 Jun, 2024

Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, “Learning from Las Vegas” was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time — that the billboards and casinos of Las Vegas were worthy of architectural attention — and offered a challenge for contemporary architects obsessed with the heroic and monumental. The physical book itself, designed by MIT’s iconic designer Muriel Cooper, was hailed as a masterpiece of modernist design, but the book’s design struck the authors as too grandiose for a text that championed the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental.

This article is excerpted from the facsimile edition of “Learning From Las Vegas,” published in 2017.

Out of respect to the authors, the original, gold-stamped, clothbound edition, published in a modest print run of 2,000, was never reprinted. The book that became known to generations of architecture students is the modified second edition, a paperback redesigned by Denise Scott Brown for publication in 1977.

But around 2016, MIT Press’s esteemed editor Roger Conover approached Denise with a proposition: Would she be willing to write a new preface to a facsimile hardcover edition, “saying whatever you want to say about the book’s original design and production”? On the condition that there would be no editing of her text, and that she would have the last word in the case of any editorial differences, a deal was struck. The resulting 2017 facsimile edition reunited the original design with a spirited new preface by Scott Brown, featured below, in which she looks back on the creation of the book and explains her and Robert Venturi’s reservations about the original design.

–The Editors

Early Modern graphics are back. TV’s sassiest talking heads and edgiest ads are supported today by gutsy 1930s sans serif fonts, stark words, and bold Bauhaus colors. In this context, MIT’s decision to reproduce the “legendary” first edition of “Learning from Las Vegas” has met with a near universal “Cool!” So when we call the book’s design “one irony too far” people ask, “What’s their beef?”

Let me explain.

The Las Vegas studio upended sacred cows, refused to view with alarm, would not bad-mouth bad taste, and redefined architectural research. Our views emerged from Early Modern architecture and its postwar Brutalist admirers. These European thoughtways we linked to social protest of the 1960s, American social planning of that era, and emerging attitudes on democratic participation, popular culture, Pop Art, and new roles in architecture for history, symbolism, and communication.

These approaches shared an adversary: post-World War II urban renewal and its architecture, “Late Modern” to its practitioners. To us it was a twisting of Early Modern in search of the heroic and original. We called it “H&O” — ironically, because it brought social harm and urban problems. Against it we posed “U&O,” the ugly and ordinary vernacular of strips and sprawl, universal in America and studied by the LLV Studio in auto cities of the Southwest and the Las Vegas Strip.

Lower Strip, looking north, 1966. Photo by Denise Scott Brown; courtesy Denise Scott Brown.

Photography was our primary tool. Propounding ideas with a focus as unpalatable as everyday architecture is not easy. We knew it would require showing “what is” before proposing “what should be” and would call for pictures as well as words to explain to ourselves what we were learning, but we soon found that the combination could help others understand our ideas too. And we discovered what every architectural journal knows, that the captions under pictures are the only texts most architects will read. So we chose a medium with generous pictures and generous captions — the photo essay.

The first LLV Studio photo essays were introductory programs that we, as faculty, produced. These described its subject matter and study topics via photographs, graphics, lectures, and written materials. As the students began their research, we made suggestions for execution, and along the way offered help and advice. But soon their own creativity was engaged, and so was Steven Izenour’s. Our student at Penn and teaching assistant at Yale, Steve became coauthor of “Learning from Las Vegas” and a lifetime associate at VSBA. Spending long nights in studio, he advised particularly on films, photography, and production.

Only on the cover was The Strip revealed as we wanted it, within a format to be read as either a scholarly monograph or a 1940s cigarette-card album, as both pop and high culture.

In writing the book, we outlined study topics, documented research and its results, and added comment, interpretation, and theory in two chapters with Victorian-sounding titles. As the work emerged, its outrageous photos and ebullient maps and diagrams created a hate-love exhilaration that to us conveyed the core of Las Vegas. So we asked the publisher to avoid formats that would restrict or compete with these joyful expressions. To no avail. Only on the cover was The Strip revealed as we wanted it, within a format to be read as either a scholarly monograph or a 1940s cigarette-card album, as both pop and high culture. This melding, our hijinks not theirs, represents our only contribution to the graphic design of the first edition. Muriel Cooper, MIT Press art director, acclaimed radical and renowned graphic artist, chose to design the book herself. In her mind, “Learning from Las Vegas” was to be a salute to the Bauhaus, and she believed we would go well together. But for Muriel, “radical” meant the revolution previous to ours, and, by the early 1950s, aging Modernists were far removed from the Bauhaus we knew. Their Late Modern urban projects, ones we called H&O in the book, brought the Brutalists and others concerned with street life, popular culture, communication, and symbolism to the ramparts. And in 1958, Herbert Gans, Jane Jacobs, and the social planners joined them. I was already there with the Brutalists, but was also, through my South African and Jewish heritage, involved with debates on democracy and the loss of innocence — the ethical roots of Postmodernism. And when Robert Venturi and I met, he was headed there too.

Urban riots in the 1960s complete the story of how Late Modern thought and products became the subject of LLV’s architectural and social critique. But graphic designers of the 1960s clung to the Modernist vision, with its role for them as possessors of a not-to-be-questioned expertise and a revelation that leads “the people” to rationality and freedom. “Would you tell a surgeon how to design a scalpel?” one designer (not Muriel) responded when probed on the legibility of a thin font on a busy train station platform. And here is Muriel on designing for LLV and its authors: “I thought: ‘Boy, this is wonderful material. I’m not gonna let them screw it.’ Hah! You should have seen it! Well, they hated it! I loved it.” Cooper proposed putting a bubble-wrap jacket around the book, in homage to Las Vegas’s glitz — a suggestion we firmly rejected. “What they wanted most was a Duck, not a Decorated Shed. I gave them a Duck,” Cooper ironized. She must have meant the cover, the only place where she gave way. Yet ducks lie in the eye of the beholder. I would have called the cover decoration on the shed. But sadly the rest was anything but a shed.

Whatever she did later in electronics, Muriel was in our view a Late Modern book designer who abandoned the vigor of 1930s graphics for a more polite 1950s invention, Swiss Graphics and what went with it. This was the major reason for our disagreement.

However, our first criticisms were of function. The book was big, heavy, difficult to handle at a library table and impossible to read on a bus or carry in a jeans pocket. Sized to the length of The Strip, it had room to display and explain our complex matrices and charts and the leporellos we derived from Ed Ruscha. But although The Strip will pop your eyes out, nowhere was it shown in large colored pictures. Its postage stamp color shots, too small and too muddy to convey neon 22 stories high or the glint of glaze on a Roman centurion, limited our ability to make our argument.

Such cramping compositional directives I called the Tyranny of the Template. Its major limitation was a high ratio of background space to foreground content, favoring white space over picture size and content visibility. Blocks of text were proportioned to the white space more than to the illustrations. These, and the small Helvetica fonts preferred by Muriel, made our texts too short to fill the blocks. To keep pace with the illustrations they referred to, text lines had to be triple-spaced and words stretched widely on them. This guaranteed an uncomfortable read and a book design that T. S. Eliot might have called a “periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion.”

That our argument against Late Modern was couched in Late Modern graphics conveyed, to say the least, a mixed message — “one irony too far,” I said. We argued mightily with Muriel. “Why, when we’re criticizing the use of H&O as a panacea for everything, would you use it for our book? How confusing for readers!” At a meeting in the MIT Press library, Bob gestured toward the shelves: “You could use the graphics of any one of your technical books and we wouldn’t complain.”

No one at the Press agreed, but we were allowed to reject the bubble-wrap cover — how could that have denoted a block-long animated neon façade? However, Muriel, distressed by our “scholarly” cover, concealed it in a glassine, Helvetica-bedecked dust jacket. Yet she did not dare hide our inset picture of a desert billboard cum triumphal archway, from which a near-naked female calls “Tan Hawaiian with Tanya.” So she broke her text where the axially placed Tanya was, to leave her visible under the jacket. We hated the glassine fig leaf, its spindly font and H&O aspirations, but the semi-avoidance of Tanya made it even worse. (Nevertheless, the jacket, where it survives, adds to the selling price of the book.)

“Tanya” Billboard on the Strip, Las Vegas, 1968 ©Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc., Philadelphia.

To be fair, the first edition sold well, though partly through the publisher’s subvention. And by placing the work programs, especially the urban ones, beside their products, this edition reminds readers that Southwestern urbanism was as important in our study as signs, symbols, and communication. And its comparisons of maps and pictures would have been useful had their color been accurate.

The end section illustrating our work is a happier story. Early projects look good in color here. They mark our transition from academe to practice, and the joys of “learning from” — of applying in design what we had awakened to in research. Some professional journals see illustrating your ideas through your work as unacceptable egoism. We feel that describing your thought processes and methodologies as you design, showing how you took the crucial yet taxing steps from analysis to synthesis, is a good way to explain your work. It’s a particular kindness and reassurance that practitioners can offer students, and it need not be an act of vanity. In any case, your own work is what’s available in your files and what you know best.

One project illustrates a sad fate of some new ideas — killing by old revolutionaries. Here the victim was our design for the Transportation Square office building in Washington, laid low by Gordon Bunshaft and the Washington Fine Arts Commission. The worst of their exchanges, those where the assassinations occurred, we recalled from memory, as certain Commission meetings were declared “executive sessions” — no press admitted — and their records were not available. But they are now. And so is a legal scholar’s assessment of the “Star Chamber” proceedings we endured. It’s in the LLV appendix. Sadly, the issues of equity and justice, let alone effectiveness and probity in design review, still need intelligent cogitation.

Several years after the first edition of “Learning from Las Vegas” appeared, our editor, Barbara Ankeny, called with a surprise. More copies of the book were needed, but the unsubsidized cost would be prohibitive. Would we approve a revised version, priced for students, resembling other books in the Press library, and with considerably less white space? And would we like to design it? Would we!

Our small, cheap, readable, U&O book is skimpy, but its ethos is right. It follows the graphic principles of our first edition cover: be deadpan, don’t upstage your subject, and (in the way Bob wears Brooks Brothers suits) present outrageous content in a conventional format. The revised edition took six months of my life, but it has stayed in print more than 40 years and been read by generations of students and architects.

Yet its graphic design produced other problems. A cost-saving measure placed our work programs together at the center of the book and away from their products. This underlined the identity of the studio and its value as a model for research today. But our topic work programs, already strongly abridged, were now disconnected from the maps, images, and texts that described our analyses and syntheses. This downplayed our findings on emerging automobile cities and undercut our claim that we were “evolving new tools: analytical tools for understanding new space and form, and graphic tools for representing them.”

Yet automobile cities have been as important to our work as the architecture of communication, and in this sense the first edition reflected priorities missed later. But the second, despite its size, achieved greater clarity and better comparability of illustrations, partly by altering the template and reducing the amount of white space. In revising our graphics, I remembered Eliot’s line, “the poetry does not matter,” and how he ransacked the unpoetic to find a poetry for our time. And in learning from urban ideas of complexity and our experience “curating” slide lectures, I aimed to make points rather than look pretty.

Our urban interests were not edged out when schools introduced their own research studios. In fact, urban activity and land use maps were the first to be adapted from our topics. But there are many more research ideas to quarry from LLV, and in our practice we have adapted themes from Southwest urbanism, the Penn planning program, and Princeton Beaux-Arts analytiques — for use in architecture.

So some good came from the first edition. And welcome to its reissue, which provides opportunities to rethink what’s appropriate today to H&O, and what’s to be gained, post-NeoMo, and most of the time, from U&O — that modest, mannerist, wily dodger.

Denise Scott Brown is an architect, writer, and planner. She and Robert Venturi are founding principals of the influential architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates (VSBA), whose work and ideas have influenced generations of architects and planners. This article is excerpted from the facsimile edition of “Learning From Las Vegas.”

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Moshe Safdie: My Steps and Gardens and Bees

Architect Moshe Safdie describes how his boyhood fascination with steps, terraces, and the wax hexagons of beehives led him to a life immersed in the complexities of design.

By: Moshe Safdie

10:08AM, 24 Jun, 2024

Everything about Haifa, the city of my birth, seemed to be about climbing steps. The city had originated on the shores of the Haifa-Acre Bay. Some years before my birth, the British built a modern port and the city began climbing the slopes of Mount Carmel. I was born in a Bauhaus-style apartment building abutting the Technion, the Institute of Technology, halfway up the mount. By the time I turned 10 we were elevated, in more than one sense, and lived in a building up the hill. It was a three-story building; the ground floor apartments opened to gardens below and mid-level apartments had side entrances. We lived on the top floor that we reached through a bridge from the mountainside. We also owned the roof of the building, which had an extraordinary view of the bay and the Lebanon Mountains.

This article is excerpted from the volume “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind,” edited by Sherry Turkle.

One hundred and seventy-three steps led up the hill to the crest — Hadar Hacarmel, as it was known — the center of my school and social life. In the morning I would skip steps two at a time, rain or shine, to the crest. From there I would either pick up a bike or a bus to school. Returning in the afternoon, I perfected my run, skipping four stairs at a time, timing myself, hoping to break my own record.

Agricultural stone terraces built hundreds of years ago graduated the slopes. Steps abounded everywhere. The land surrounding our building was nearly vacant. As this was a time of austerity, we put the land to good use. Earth was turned (often revealing centipedes or scorpions), and we planted tomatoes, cucumbers, and sweet peas. We built a hen house from leftover wood cases to supply eggs for the family.

One spring day, returning from school, I reported with great excitement that I could bring home a beehive. Everyone was short on sugar and the beehive promised honey. My parents were skeptical, but it arrived and was placed on the roof. It consisted of a basic box, a family of bees with its queen, and a series of empty frames, each with a base sheet upon which the bees could construct their house of wax. I watched with amazement as the bees went to work. Week by week, they constructed their house of perfect geometry, a series of hexagons, all seemingly identical, rising in orderly fashion, filling frame after frame. As the bees worked, I read profusely. I learned that the hexagonal cells were not all alike. Some were slightly bigger; in those, male eggs would be raised. Other cells, once filled with honey, would be sealed. I observed the queen, moving from cell to cell, laying her eggs. I watched for the wax moth — the curse of bees. I felt witness to the construction of an entire city, panel by panel, neighborhood by neighborhood. Different cells were specialized in function. Some were for the storage of food, others for raising future workers and queens, and some for the useless males, useless that is, except when their services were urgently required. This happened when an old queen was replaced by a new one and she needed her once-in-a-lifetime impregnation.

I felt witness to the construction of an entire city, panel by panel, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Even for an 11-year-old, it was clear that this complex world was highly efficient. It exhibited a fitness to purpose that resulted in extraordinary beauty. I probably could not have articulated these words “fitness to purpose” until a decade later, when at age 22, by then an architect and apprentice in Louis Kahn’s office, I was devouring D’Arcy Thompson’s “On Growth and Form.” The memory of my bees made D’Arcy Thompson’s words more vivid. His studies of the lattice bone structure in the vulture’s wing, the logarithmic growth pattern of the nautilus shell, the efficient space packing of insects’ habitats, were enriched by my having the beehive as a reference point.

In Haifa you could move up or down the hill via steps everywhere, or you could move along the contours of the sloped surface. Five hundred meters to the west of my house was the world center of the Bahá’í religion, the burial place of the founder of Bahá’í.

There relatively arid terraced land that had sustained a few olives, cypresses, and carob trees, was transformed into a lush, green paradise garden. There was a sudden transition across a wrought iron fence that marked off a major estate of a hundred acres. Fashioned in the Persian garden tradition, adapted to the steep topography, there were monumental stairs made of white marble that ascended up and down the hill on its axis, that is, directly perpendicular to the slope, and a series of gently meandering paths, accentuated by long rows of cypress and palm trees. Some of the paths were paved with loose chips of red tiles, others with gray river pebbles, others yet with fine marble gravel. There were colorful paths cutting through flowerbeds, grass areas manicured to perfection, little round garden pavilions of white Corinthian columns and, always on axis, bronze peacocks whose oxidized dark castings were highlighted with gold leaf and silver. As I traversed the paths, I had the feeling that I was sinking into a carpet, my body size diminishing, living within the rich geometries of the familiar Persian carpets that every room in my parent’s house possessed.

I abhorred Bible class. Five years later, exiled to Canada, I would discover the Bible through an Anglican teacher at Westmont High School in Montreal when I studied the book of Job and immersed myself in its description of the paradoxes of life. But for now, I was convinced that the paradise garden of the first book of Genesis resembled my Bahá’í garden. As I walked through it, I would not have been surprised to come across Adam and Eve. There were certainly enough fig trees to supply the necessary attire.

In years to come, I had a recurring obsession in my work — I made buildings you could climb on, buildings that were gardens, gardens that were buildings, steps and gardens everywhere, even the title of my second book bears its trace, “For Everyone a Garden.”

In years to come, I had a recurring obsession in my work — I made buildings you could climb on, buildings that were gardens, gardens that were buildings.

By the time I was 14, my beehive had expanded. The one box had become two and then three, extending upwards in modular fashion. My family, unable to consume all the honey, shared it with relatives and neighbors. It was then that we received a new assignment in science class: to describe how energy is harnessed by making drawings and illustrations. Though I could draw with considerable ease, drawings seemed inadequate to describe what I had in mind. I joined with a friend and we decided to make a model. With a model, we could create a lake formed by a dam, show the water drop into turbines below, set windmills on the ridge, irrigate the terraces downhill, and so on. In the basement of a building that had been used as an air raid shelter during the Second World War, we found an old, unused door and used it as the base for our model. We purchased many pounds of clay to form hills, a lake, and valleys. We cut up little weeds to represent trees. We used dyes to color the landscape. We tried simulations by pouring water above and seeing it trickle downwards and we began searching for a pump that might keep the system going. We did all of this in a week of intensive work. We never attempted to move our model (nearly 4 × 7 feet in dimension) from our garden. By the time we had to bring it to school, it must have weighed a hundred pounds. Finally, with great effort, six of us tried to move it, ever anxious about cracking the clay. Eventually we hired a small truck, a transport arranged by proud parents, and our model was brought to school. Until then, I had been an indifferent student, at times flirting with expulsion. I had refused to do homework or comply with assignments. Now I was rising well above the call of duty.

I will never forget the excitement of making that first model. We had shaped the forms of the hills and streams. I felt like an extension of God’s hands, shaping the landscape to my will. I felt a sense of what might come: conceiving and shaping buildings and landscape, a design process dependent on making models.

Only a year later, my life was disrupted by my parents’ decision to immigrate to snowy, cold Montreal. I was on my way to a new world. Before we could leave for Canada, my family needed visas that could be issued only by the Consul General in Milan, Italy. The process took thirty days. To appease me and my brother and sister, all outraged by our enforced exile, my parents took us sightseeing: in Rome, there was the Forum, the Coliseum, the Vatican, and a place that transfixed me, Hadrian’s Villa. Soon we were in Milan, where the roof of the Duomo, with its flying buttresses and fantasyland sculpture, became our playground. There were excursions to Lake Maggiore and Lake Como, to the floating island palaces in the lake, and the terraced gardens of Stresa. Within two years, as I completed high school year in Montreal and prepared to apply to university, there was no question in my mind. I would apply to the school of architecture.

Moshe Safdie has an international architectural practice designing a wide range of building types, including housing, arts, civic, and cultural buildings on four continents. After graduating from McGill University, he apprenticed with Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia. He realized Habitat ’67 at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal and played a major role in the rebuilding of Jerusalem. He has taught architecture at Harvard, Yale, McGill, and Ben-Gurion universities. This article is excerpted from the volume “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind,” edited by Sherry Turkle.

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The Absence of Black Soldiers in Civil War Photos Speaks Volumes

The photographic archive of the war is one of astounding substance and meaning but also astounding absence.

John Reekie, "A Burial Party," Cold Harbor, Virginia, 1865. Source: Wikimedia Commons

By: Kimberly Juanita Brown

10:11AM, 19 Jun, 2024

Five black men fill the photographic space with the visible labor their bodies represent. One stands, and three are bent over as they negotiate the Virginia earth and the burial task they must perform. In the forefront of the image, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the seated black man and the skeletal remains of American Civil War soldiers alongside him. He gazes back at the camera, his head tilted slightly to the left, close to the first of five skulls that look like macabre extensions of his own body. The five skulls anchor the five living figures in the image and provide a figurative line of defense against possible threat.

This article is adapted from Kimberly Juanita Brown’s book “Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual.” Additional resources can be found here.

The Civil War was imagined as a white man’s war; visually devoid of black soldiers and their corporeal sacrifice, the imagery that remains is instead a visual register of white sacrifice. White soldiers dying for the sins of the country and the sins of black people — that is, the sin that is slavery. The photographic archive of the war is one of astounding substance and meaning, but also astounding absence and refusal. There, in the precise envisioning of the archive, we see few images of African Americans outside their prescribed roles of subservience; they are presented mostly as servants, refugees, contraband, gravediggers. We can imagine that the graves dug signify these men’s own buried or submerged citizenship that does not allow black Americans to firmly situate themselves within the geographic space of the nation. Instead, they are seen to be ever awaiting a future reconciliation that is never to arrive but is always on its way. Black Americans, as this image intimates, exist on the periphery of the national family, and documentary photographs illustrate this repeatedly.

Something of the memory of the American Civil War haunts the present, aided by these photographs. Beyond the 600,000 dead and the catastrophe of its ruined landscape, something else is present, palpable and visible. It is a hovering sense of national mourning that has not sustained African Americans within the national imaginary: “A scaffolding of bone we tread upon, forgetting,” as the poet Natasha Trethewey writes. A past and a future tense of racial hegemony. It begins in the photographic archive of dead Civil War soldiers, facilitating a process of mourning that reinforces citizenship and national belonging. Yet black soldiers exist outside of this framework.

Black Americans exist on the periphery of the national family, and documentary photographs illustrate this repeatedly.

A perusal of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress shows the available archive has its limitations. Before a search for African American soldiers in the Civil War can begin, the researcher is informed that “images of African American soldiers are not well-represented” in the archive. Instead, “most photographs show African Americans as civilians attached to the military, and as ‘contraband’ and refugees.” These images convey a repeated metaphor of black subjectivity occupying an impossible duality of property and person, of contraband and comrade, and of refugee and citizen.

The paucity of images of African Americans in the photographic archive of the Civil War (composed of nearly 1 million images) replicates an erasure of visible blackness when that blackness is a part of the discourse of the event. In the aftermath of the Civil War and its ghostly remembrances, in the sliver of space between slavery’s demise and the spectacular production of lynching photography, the recovery mission of the nation doubled black death against a refusal of citizenship, necessitating the production of photographic memory on the part of African Americans to make space for the imagistic absence of black subjects and black subjectivity.

Of the famous Gardner photographs of deceased white Civil War soldiers blanketing battlefields across the country, Susan Sontag writes, “With our dead, there has always been a powerful interdiction against showing the naked face.” For Sontag, this is what gives the images their exceptional force, as “Union and Confederate soldiers lie on their backs, with the faces of some clearly visible.” It is a consolidation of racial alignment that allows this to be visualized and held in memory. White soldiers, even the traitorous Confederates, are seen as the epitome of sacrifice — to die for the preservation of an idea, white supremacy — while black soldiers register as the contraband white lives are sacrificed for.

Encased in a refusal to incorporate black people into the national imaginary, contemporary literature about the Civil War is more than just a reclaiming of the available archive: It is a reconfiguration of what it means to read against the grain of what is already there. I want to think about the photographic space opened by the onset of the Civil War as one that framed black subjectivity in increasingly narrowing parameters, even as a separate African American archive existed. I also want to think about the space of contemporary photography as expansive enough to imagine black futurity against the containing register of race and nation.

“Gathering Cotton on a Southern Plantation,” Dallas, Texas, 1900. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Decades after the Civil War ends, stereographs of black laborers culling cotton appeared in the United States. These images then, visually out of time, are also solidified through a photographic stasis that attempts to hold black Americans in a state of enslavement that seemingly never ends. The never-ending extension of slavery’s presence is the disciplinary framework of racialized violence we have come to know. How then to discuss the pleasures of looking when those doing the looking are white, while the wounded, exploited, and dead are black? Black writers, artists, and activists have not had the luxury of passive attention. Not when, as Toni Morrison writes, “photographs of dead black bodies surrounded by happy white onlookers” are a central feature of lynching images in the United States.

Black writers, artists, and activists have not had the luxury of passive attention.

Mortevivum is the term I have come up with to understand this particular photographic phenomenon: the hyperavailability of images in the media that traffic in tropes of impending black death. These tropes cohere around an ocular logic steeped in racial violence (and the nostalgia engendered therein), and they make any tragedy, any crisis, an opportunity for viewers to find pleasure in black peoples’ pain. The doubling mechanism of mortevivum is the schematic cartography of unbelonging that hinges on the absence of black bodies in the photographic archive of the American Civil War, and the hyperpresence of black bodies in images of the dead at the end of the 20th century. Whiteness constructs the documentary photographic space within its own binary logic, marking the photograph in and through the bodies that it contains. If whiteness is sempervivum (the live forever) of the American Civil War in this documentary logic, then blackness functions as a default mortevivum (the death living). In acknowledging the limited representation of black soldiers in Civil War photographs, we confront the enduring legacy of racial exclusion and the imagery that continues to bind blackness to death.

Kimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College where she is also an Associate Professor of English and creative writing. She is the author of “The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary” (Duke University Press) and “Mortevivum,” from which this article is adapted.

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Table of Contents

The MIT Press Reader: 18 Jul, 2024

All articles

‘Mein Kampf’ as a Propaganda Playbook

When Design Is the Problem

Sex and ‘Female Semen’ in the Medieval Arab World

The Man Who Invented Times Square: O.J. Gude and the Birth of the Spectacular

How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism

Mind-Reading and Neuroplasticity: In Conversation With Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone

The Tyranny of the Template: The Graphic Design of the First Edition of ‘Learning From Las Vegas’

Moshe Safdie: My Steps and Gardens and Bees

The Absence of Black Soldiers in Civil War Photos Speaks Volumes