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Monday, June 30th, 2025
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| 5:19a | Listen to Never-Before-Heard Works by Erik Satie, Performed 100 Years After His Death If asked to name our favorite French composer of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, most of us would reach straight for Erik Satie, being able to bring to mind only his most famous pieces, the Gymnopédies and perhaps the Gnossiennes. We may not know that those works all date from the same few years of his career between the late eighteen-eighties and the early nineties. They also represent only a small portion indeed of his artistic output, which includes a great deal of instrumental and vocal music as well as compositions for dramatic works, written between 1886 and his death in 1925 — the coming hundredth anniversary of which is being celebrated with the recording of newly discovered pieces. As the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge writes, these “twenty-seven previously unheard works by Erik Satie, from playful cabaret songs to minimalist nocturnes” have been “painstakingly pieced together from hundreds of small notebooks,” most of them written “in the bohemian bistros of Montmartre in Paris where Satie worked as a pianist.” Their rediscovery owes to the efforts of two composers, James Nye and Sato Matsui, who “tracked down the lost material in various archival collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.” They’ve now been recorded by pianist Alexandre Tharaud, and you can hear the resulting album, Satie: Discoveries, in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post.
Related content: Watch Animated Scores of Eric Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1” How Erik Satie’s ‘Furniture Music’ Was Designed to Be Ignored and Paved the Way for Ambient Music The Velvet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vexations on I’ve Got a Secret (1963) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
| 8:00a | A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and wholly dependent on advanced technologies whose workings they could scarcely hope to explain. Naturally, it feels even truer now, a quarter of the way into our digital twenty-first century. Indeed, for all we know about how they really work, our credit cards, our smartphones, our computers, and indeed the internet itself might as well be magic.
To best understand the technology that increasingly makes up our world, we should attempt to understand the evolution of that technology. Those smartphones, for example, couldn’t have been invented in the form we know them without the previous developments of chemically strengthened glass, the multi-touch screen interface, and the camera phone. Each of those individual technologies also has its predecessors: follow the chain back far enough, and eventually you get to the likes of the mobile radio telephone, invented in 1946; the phased array antenna, invented in 1905; and glass, invented around 1500 BC. These and countless other paths can be traced at the Historical Tech Tree, an ambitious project of writer and programmer Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Fortier-Dubois credits among his inspirations Sid Meier’s Civilization games, with their all-important “tech trees,” and James Burke’s television series Connections, which highlighted the unpredictable processes by which one innovation could lead to others across the centuries or millennia. Even in the seventies, Fortier-Dubois writes, “Burke was already concerned that our lives depend on technological systems that very few people deeply understand. It is, of course, possible to live without comprehending how computers, money, or airplanes work. But when everything around us feels vaguely magical, reliant on experts whose actions we have no way of verifying, it’s easy to lose trust in technological solutions to our current problems.” He offers the Historical Tech Tree as a potential corrective to that loss of understanding and the enervating attitudes it produces.
Fortier-Dubois himself admits that the project “made me realize how little I knew about the objects around me. I didn’t really know that ‘electronics’ meant controlling the flow of electrons with vacuum tubes or semiconductors, or that refining petroleum into kerosene uses fractional distillation, or that WiFi and bluetooth are just the use of certain radio frequencies that can be detected by a specific kind of chip.” Anyone who explores even this early version of the Historical Tech Tree (which, as of this writing, contains 1886 technologies and 2180 connections between them) will find it an educational experience in the same way, providing as it does not just knowledge about technology Related content: An Interactive Timeline Covering 14 Billion Years of History: From The Big Bang to 2015 The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic The History of Philosophy Visualized The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
but a sense of how much of that knowledge we lack. Our civilization has made its way from stone tools to robotaxis, mRNA vaccines, and LLM chatbots; we’d all be better able to inhabit it with even a slightly clearer idea of how it did so. Visit the | << Previous Day |
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