Super Pop!

English is the most convoluted, clanky, and complicated language since . . . Middle English, at least. It has some German in it, and some Latin, and some Greek, and some Twitter, and some hip-hop, and some slang, and some jargon, and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera. It is a frabjous, fabulous, fantabulous junkpile! And instead of an Académie Française to serve as guard dog, English just has a stack of dictionaries that are all too eager to expand and update. And so here we are, with hundreds of thousands of words, and no one to speak them sensibly.

So what does this mean, in sum? Culturally, we speak the language of a rudderless ship—but the Open University has volunteered to serve as Secretary as we wend our way to shipwreck. To continue (fatally) with this long-winded metaphor, there are enough facts, and enough information, in this ten-minute, animated lecture, to sink a ship. And everyone who’s anyone makes an appearance here—the Romans, the French, the Vikings, the Scots, and, of course, LOLcats. If you have ever wondered where our days of the week came from or why we use French-sounding words for the meats we eat but German-sounding words for the animals on the farm, you’ll find your answers here. And before I forget, let me say again: This all happens in ten minutes. Less time than it takes to fold a fitted sheet! And it’s animated! Plus William Shakespeare! #Winners! #Wieners! #Whiners! #Whoop!

The hard sciences are, as their name implies, hard to learn, hard to do, and hard to talk about. But once you know something, you actually know it! Two plus two is four, and force equals mass times acceleration, and next question, please! Philosophy, on the other hand, means literally “the love of wisdom”—but what is love, and what is wisdom, and can we use human language to approach a deeper truth? And so, what began as a thrilling concept about the hunt for truth and wisdom ends up, almost immediately, in a quagmire. Or, as Bertrand Russell put it once: “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing, or worth following.

Every generation has its own set of philosophical questions and answers and struggles, but whether you want to understand Plato’s parable of the cave, gain some insight into the problem of evil, or investigate how philosophy can be practically applied, Philosophy Bites is the place to go. In this long-running podcast, hosts David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton conduct brief but incredibly compelling and provocative interviews with experts from a wide variety of fields on the Big Questions of human life and thought.

Stephen Hawking is a smart person. (Very, very, very smart.) And since being diagnosed with a motor neuron disease in 1963 (when he was given two years to live), he has made a series of tremendous strides in helping scientists conceptualize the origin of the universe and the mechanics of such strange phenomena as black holes, light cones, and supergravity. With A Brief History of Time he also made his theories, proofs, and the basis for his thinking available to a popular audience as well.

This sounds impossible at first, because—well, here are a couple facts about black holes, just taken at random: They allow no light to escape, and so they’re invisible; the “supermassive” black hole at the center of our solar system has a mass equal to four million suns. Its name is “Sagittarius A.” (We named our black hole, I guess because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get its attention at a party.) This is crazier than the craziest Spock imitator at a Star Trek convention. And yet, when reading A Brief History of Time, you’ll take all this in with a shrug, like, “Oh yeah, of course, that makes sense, because [some other crazily named phenomenon/ fact you learned about earlier].” Stephen Hawking, creator of outlandish theories, prover of unbelievable facts, habitual blower of minds. And recurring character on The Simpsons.

Cats don’t always land on their feet. But the myth of cats having nine lives isn’t hurt much by the evidence that cats do in fact tend to survive falls from heights of more than seven stories, after achieving terminal velocity. “Terminal velocity” is a technical term, but it’s also apt, because living beings that achieve terminal velocity are generally terminated. (Operation Dumbo Drop was a rare exception to this rule, but of course, that Dumbo was aided by a parachute and a Danny Glover.) So the question is, are cats actually little devils, capable of dark magic tricks at high speeds? How else could they manage this survival trick? The answer is found in the “conservation of angular momentum,” but you’ll have to watch the video to understand what that means. (And you’ll have to grow a tail if you want to imitate their trick.)

So remember a few years ago when all those banks went bankrupt and the housing market crashed and stock prices plummeted and suddenly all the new jobs dried up, too? It was, of course, no coincidence that all those things happened at once. Even if you were paying no attention to the news, the sense of a related series of unfortunate events was impossible to avoid. But at the same time, what’s a CDO, how do credit default swaps work, and what do all the numbers really mean? There were a lot of explanations on offer at the time, and even though there was a consensus, more or less, even the briefest rundowns still left most people scratching their heads. That’s where Jonathan Jarvis comes to the rescue. In a twelve-minute animated video, he supplements a nuts-and-bolts explanation with iconic characters and symbols, showing not only what all the concepts mean, but also how they relate to one another—both for better (at first) and (spoiler alert!) for worse.

In comparison to modern economics, the physics of free-falling cats, or cosmology, the media isn’t a very complicated concept. The media is, more or less, the way we communicate ideas, opinions, and art. But the way the media actually functions—the way bias works, the role of journalists, the manner in which information has to be balanced alongside profits—is very complicated indeed. Brooke Gladstone engages with these questions every week via On the Media, but in order to explain, in one sitting, how the media works, she had to take to a new medium: the graphic novel.

The Influencing Machine opens with a quick rundown on ancient media—showing how Mayan scribes operated as publicists and how Julius Caesar used an early version of the newspaper to rob the Roman senate of their mystique—and then moves on to show how American media managed to escape from the yoke of governmental oversight, and then, occasionally, fall back into that trap. But the real revelations arrive when she dives into concepts such as bias and objectivity and shows us how we can use these concepts to consume news media more intelligently and approach the media with a realistic rather than a cynical outlook. It’s a worthwhile endeavor, for both her and for us, because, in her concluding words: “We get the media we deserve.”

Statistics are great because they are better at predicting the future than the previous technologies (crystal balls and faux-crystal balls), but they’re also terrible because of all the numbers and math and enduring uncertainty. Nate Silver, however, is devoted to not just using statistics, but also explaining his process to the lay reader. It sounds a little boring—and when he was using statistical measurements to predict the win-loss records for Major League Baseball teams, he was certainly boring a lot of non-baseball fans. But when he took his zeal to the political arena and began working on a model to predict the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, America at large began to take notice. Being “right” doesn’t mean you had the right system in statistical terms, but being right also doesn’t hurt. The “FiveThirtyEight” blog has been right a lot since 2008. The American political climate seems really volatile as a result of the normal media coverage, but Silver’s blog uses math to get past a lot of the noise. Even when his predictions don’t align with your political hopes, it’s nice to just have a place where politics seems a little more like science and a little less like magic.

A city is like a Charlie Sheen: It’s great until it breaks down, but then it’s such a mess that you have to wonder how it ever managed to work in the first place. New York City is, above all else, a city, and whether it’s functioning or malfunctioning, it does so on a grand scale. The subway system was the first in the world, and it’s still running—on many of the same lines, over 100 years later. It was a marvel when it was first constructed and still remains an example for many other cities—and yet, if something happened to the water pumps (many of which are 100 years old as well), it would only take a few hours for the entire subway system to flood in serious rains . When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, all but one of the subway tunnels flooded, but almost the entire system was up and running within a week. The Works provides brief, heavily illustrated, and shockingly understandable explanations of New York City’s infrastructure, allowing readers to see how things work, why things break down, and how they recover again. It’s often disconcerting to learn how close we are to malfunction, but in sum, the book provides a remarkable portrait of an incredibly organic system.

Economix is the best crash course you could possibly imagine. It’s got history (in pictures), theory (in pictures), definitions (in pictures), and straight-talk (in pictures), and if a picture is worth a thousand words, then this book is worth, like, 58 million words—plus however many actual words it has. With the aid of this book, business periodicals actually become interesting, and normal news coverage becomes engaging. Oh, so what’s it about? Well, it is about economics, and in order to understand what I mean by that, please see the book. Agreed? Agreed. Next!

When Ernst Gombrich was 26 years old (so after he’d received his doctorate in art history, but before he’d become a world-famous art historian), he became interested in writing a brief history of the world for young readers. A friend of his wanted to publish such a book, but in order to keep to the original schedule, they would need the entire manuscript within six weeks. Gombrich accepted the challenge. Less than six weeks later, he’d completed a masterpiece of both education and entertainment. A Little History of the World is an incredible story because human beings are pretty incredible creatures, with lots of bad habits, crazy ideas, horrible problems, and very creative solutions. This is our story. And in this version, it’s unforgettable.

GET TO THE HEARTOF THE MATTERPITHY EXPLANATIONS OF REALLYCOMPLEX THINGS

GET TO THE HEART
OF THE MATTER
PITHY EXPLANATIONS OF REALLY
COMPLEX THINGS