Perhaps you’ve heard of a phenomenon called "podfade," wherein a podcast — particularly an ambitious podcast — begins by putting out episodes regularly, then misses one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceasing to update entirely. It pleases us to report that The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the podcast offering just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you posted over the past three years, not only shows no signs of podfade, but has even broadened its mandate to include a greater variety of philosophical traditions than before. For those who haven’t heard the show, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps comes from Peter Adamson, philosophy professor at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and King’s College London, and "looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition." The main show has put out 239 episodes so far, beginning with the pre-Socratics (specifically Thales) and most recently examining Franciscan poverty, and now a new branch has grown, starting from Adamson and collaborator Jonardon Ganeri’s introduction to Indian Philosophy. (Hear the first episode of the Indian Philosophy series below.) Episodes of this new series on the Indian tradition, Adamson writes, "will appear in alternating weeks with episodes on European philosophy." He also mentions a "further ambition to cover the other philosophical traditions of Asia (especially Chinese) and also African philosophy and the philosophy of the African diaspora, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are waiting for me to get to that!" You can subscribe to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps‘ Indian philosophy series on its very own podcast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philosophically-minded binge-listeners beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. "I’ve been doing my laundry to it for months and I’m only up to Maimonides," says one commenter on a Metafilter thread about the new series. "I am totally not ready for this Patañjali." Related Content: 140+ Free Online Philosophy Courses Learn The History of Philosophy in 197 Podcasts (With More to Come) Eastern Philosophy Explained with Three Animated Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams Philosophy Explained With Donuts Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 239 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

That’s right, I said it. In November, the Pope will officially release a rock/pop album called Pope Francis: Wake Up! (which you can already pre-order on iTunes). And below, you can hear the first single, "Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!" It’s one of 11 tracks. According to Rolling Stone, "The Vatican-approved LP … features the Pontiff delivering sacred hymns and excerpts of his most moving speeches in multiple languages paired with uplifting musical accompaniment ranging from pop-rock to Gregorian chant." The Pope’s songs will focus on themes that Americans are getting familiar with this week: "peace, dignity, environmental concerns and helping those most in need."Pope Francis: Wake Up! will officially go on sale on November 27th. Yup, Black Friday. via Rolling Stone Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Pope Francis Set to Release a Rock/Pop Album: Listen to the First Single is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In a quick six minutes, the animation above explains the origins of two very related problems — the Syrian Conflict & the European Refugee Crisis. How did the crisis first erupt? How did it lead to a refugee crisis? And why should we why put xenophobic fears aside and provide refugees with a safe haven in the West? All of these questions get addressed by "Kurzgesagt" ("in a nutshell" in German), whose timely animations you can find on Youtube (including a separate video on the rise of ISIS in Iraq). Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. The Syrian Conflict & The European Refugee Crisis Explained in an Animated Primer is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Above, we have what The On-Line Museum and Encyclopedia of Vision Aids believes is the world’s oldest surviving pair of glasses. Dating back to the 15th century, the glasses belonged to the Eighth Shogun, Yoshimasa Ashikaga, who reigned from 1449 to 1473, during the Muromachi period of Japanese history. Both the glasses and their accompanying case were made of hand-carved white ivory. Glasses were actually first invented, however, in Italy (some say Florence, to be precise) in 1286 or thereabouts. In a sermon from 1306, a Dominican friar wrote: "It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eyeglasses, which make for good vision… And it is so short a time that this new art, never before extant, was discovered." In the mid 14th century, paintings started to appear with people wearing eyeglasses. (Take for example Tommaso da Modena’s 1352 portrait showing the cardinal Hugh de Provence reading.) A gallery of other historic eyewear can be viewed here. via Erik Kwakkel Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. The World’s Oldest Surviving Pair of Glasses (Circa 1475) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The relationship between literary writers and the film industry has given us many a story of major creative tension or downward mobility. Most famously, we have Fitzgerald—who gravitated to Hollywood like most writers did, including the more successful Faulkner—for money. When we look at the career of one of Latin America’s most celebrated writers, however, we find a very different dynamic. Although Gabriel García Márquez did not have what we might consider a successful career in the movies, his interest in cinema—as a screenwriter, critic, and even as an actor—stemmed from a genuine, lifelong love of the medium, which he considered equal to or surpassing literature as a form of storytelling. "I thought of myself as a writer of literature," says Márquez at the beginning of the documentary Marquez: Tales Beyond Solitude, "but it was my conviction that the cinema, the image, had more possibilities of expression than literature." And yet, he goes on… Films and television have industrial, technical and mechanical limitations that literature doesn’t have. That’s why I said once, in a period of falling out with films, "My relationship with film has always been that of an uneasy marriage. We can’t live together or apart."  Film eventually needed Márquez more than he needed film. And yet he never disdained more popular entertainments, "producing more than twenty screenplays, some of them for television," according to Alessandro Rocco’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Cinema. He even relished the chance to write soap operas. In 1987, he told an interviewer, "I’ve always wanted to write soap operas. They’re wonderful. They reach far more people than books do…. The problem is that we’re condition [sic] to think that a soap opera is necessarily in bad taste, and I don’t believe this to be so." Márquez felt that the "only difference between La bella palomera" [a TV film based on his Love in the Time of Cholera] and "a bad soap opera is that the former is well written." Though his pronouncements on the creative potential of television may seem prescient today, they did not seem so at the time. In 1989, Márquez got his chance to write for television soap operas, with a script, The Telegraph tells us, "about an English governess in Venezuela called I Rent Myself Out to Dream." In the clip above from Tales Beyond Solitude, Márquez gives us his democratic philosophy of the arts: "To me music, literature, film, soap operas are different genres with one common end: to reach people…. In one single night, one episode of a TV soap can reach, in Colombia alone, 10 to 15 million people." He contrasts this with his book sales and concludes, "it’s only natural that someone who wants to reach people is attracted to TV soap like to a magnetic pole. He cannot resist it." Márquez also served as the president of the International Film and Television School, in which position, he said, "I can’t start by being scornful of TV." And yet the novelist’s regard for soaps was not simply a matter of professionalism. "For me," he said, "there’s no dividing line between cinema and television, they’re just images in motion." Ultimately, we can see Garcia Márquez’s total faith in the narrative potential of all forms of popular narrative—film, folk tale, the cherished telenovela—as an essential part of his writerly ethos, which has taken him from the daily scrum of the newsroom to the Nobel ceremony stage in Stockholm. "Ultimately all culture," he says elsewhere in the documentary, "is popular culture." Related Content: Akira Kurosawa & Gabriel García Márquez Talk About Filmmaking (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Interview Read 10 Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Interviews) Literary Remains of Gabriel García Márquez Will Rest in Texas Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Gabriel García Márquez Describes the Cultural Merits of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Would John Lennon’s "Imagine" have been such a big hit if it had come from an unknown singer/songwriter instead of one of the most famous rock stars in the world? Impossible to say. Maybe a better question is: could anyone else have written the song? "Imagine" has become much more than a soft rock anthem since its release in 1971; it has become a global phenomenon. Among the innumerable big events at which the humanist hymn appears we can include, since 2005, New York’s New Year’s Eve celebration and, just recently, a performance by pop star Shakira at the UN General Assembly just before Pope Francis’ historical appearance. It seems an odd choice, given the song’s apparent anti-religious message. And yet, though Lennon was no fan of organized religion, he told Playboy magazine in a 1980 interview that the song was inspired by "the concept of positive prayer" in a Christian prayer book given to him by Dick Gregory. "If you can imagine a world at peace," said Lennon, "with no denominations of religion—not without religion but without this my God-is-bigger-than-your-God-thing—then it can be true…." As if to underscore that particular point in his adaptation of "Imagine" in the video above, cartoonist Pablo Stanley includes such religiously diverse, yet ecumenical figures as the agnostic Albert Einstein, Protestant Martin Luther King, Jr., Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, and Rastafarian Bob Marley, along with less-famous freedom fighters like Harvey Milk and murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Stanley’s "Imagine" originally appeared in webcomic form, sans music, on his blog Stanleycolors.com. It seems that several people took exception to an earlier, mostly black-and-white draft (which also included what looks like the once-very-Southern-Baptist Jimmy Carter), so Stanley issued a multi-point disclaimer under his revised, full-color version. He states that this "is NOT an anti-religion/atheist propaganda comic"—charges also unfairly levied at Lennon’s song. Stanley doesn’t address the fact that most of the famous people in his comic, including Lennon, were assassinated, though this blog post offers a suggestive theory with interview footage from Lennon himself. In every respect, the comic adaption of "Imagine" hews pretty closely to Lennon’s call for world peace. In another Beatles-penned ballad-adaptation, however, things take a much darker turn. Stanley uses his personal experience of near-suicidal depression in his comic realization of Paul McCartney’s song of lost love, "Yesterday." (See a video version above, webcomic version here.) This is grim stuff, to be sure, but Stanley assures us that he "overcame that situation." His commentary offers a hopeful take on the painful ending: "Looking at the yesterday reminds me that I should thrive for the tomorrow." I’m sure McCartney would agree with the sentiment. For many more smart, moving—though non-Beatles-related—comics from Pablo Stanley, see his blog, Stanley Colors. Related Content: The John Lennon Sketchbook, a Short Animation Made of Lennon’s Drawings, Premieres on YouTube Hear John Lennon’s Final Interview, Taped on the Last Day of His Life (December 8, 1980) The Rolling Stone Interview with John Lennon (1970) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness John Lennon’s "Imagine" & Paul McCartney’s "Yesterday" Adapted into Smart, Moving Webcomics is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

What’s your favorite color? A simple question, sure — the very first one many of us learn to ask — but one to consider seriously if you see a future for yourself in filmmaking. Earlier this year, we featured video studies on the use of the color red by Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick. Yasujiro Ozu, as Jonathan Crow points out in that post, "made the jump to color movies very reluctantly late in his career and promptly became obsessed with the color red," and a teakettle of that color even became his visual signature. No less an auteur than Krzysztof Kieślowski made not just a picture called Red, but another called Blue and another called White, which together form the acclaimed "Three Colors" trilogy. Jean-Luc Godard, never one to be outdone, has also made vivid use throughout his career of not just red but white and blue as well. The video above, "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge - A Godard Supercut," compiles three minutes of such colorful moments from the Godard filmography, drawing from his works A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, and Made in U.S.A., all of which did much to define 1960s world cinema, capturing with their vivid colors performances by Godardian icons Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina. "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge" comes from Cinema Sem Lei, the source of another aesthetically driven video essay we’ve previously featured on how German Expressionism influenced Tim Burton. This one makes less of an argument than that one did, but truly obsessive cinephiles may still find themselves able to construct one. An obvious starting point: we consider few filmmakers as French as Godard, and which country’s flag has these very colors? Well, besides those of America, Australia, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, Iceland, North Korea, Luxembourg, Schleswig-Holstein, Thailand, and so on. And in interviews, Godard has distanced himself from pure Frenchness, preferring the designation "Franco-Swiss." But still, you can start thinking there. Or you can just enjoy the images. Related Content: How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay Wes Anderson Likes the Color Red (and Yellow) Jean-Luc Godard Gives a Dramatic Reading of Hannah Arendt’s "On the Nature of Totalitarianism" A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963) Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Commercial for Schick (1971) Jean-Luc Godard’s Debut, Opération béton(1955) — a Construction Documentary Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. "Bleu, Blanc, Rouge": a Striking Supercut of the Vivid Colors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

In this short stop-motion film, Alexandra Lemay draws some creative inspiration from Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick and leaves us with a "cautionary tale of what happens when we don’t think enough about what we buy." Produced as part of the National Film Board of Canada’s Hothouse apprenticeship program, All the Rage follows a mink’s experience shopping in a luxury fur store. It’s perhaps not too much of a spoiler to say, it doesn’t end well. Lemay tells you more about the making of the film here. And don’t miss the many great films in the Animation section of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intelligent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Fantastic Mr. Fox Meets The Shining in an Animated, Cautionary Tale About Consumerism is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

What is it that makes us human? And how best to ensure that we all get our fair say? For director, photographer, and environmental activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the answers lay in framing all of his interview subjects using the same single image layout. The formal simplicity and unwavering gaze of his new documentary, Human, encourage viewers to perceive his 2,020 subjects as equals in the storytelling realm. There’s a deep diversity of experiences on display here, arranged for maximum resonance. The quietly content first wife of a polygamist marriage is followed by a polyamorous fellow, whose unconventional lifestyle is a source of both torment and joy. There’s a death row inmate. A lady so confident she appears with her hair in curlers. Where on earth did he find them? His subjects hail from 60 countries. Arthus-Bertrand obviously went out of his way to be inclusive, resulting in a wide spectrum of gender and sexual orientations, and subjects with disabilities, one a Hiroshima survivor. Tears, laughter, conflicting emotions… students of theater and psychiatry would do well to bookmark this page. There’s a lot one can glean from observing these subjects’ unguarded faces. The project was inspired by an impromptu chat with a Malian farmer. The director was impressed by the frankness with which this stranger spoke of his life and dreams: I dreamed of a film in which the power of words would resonate with the beauty of the world. Putting the ills of humanity at the heart of my work—poverty, war, immigration, homophobia—I made certain choices. Committed, political choices. But the men talked to me about everything: their difficulty in growing as well as their love and happiness. This richness of the human word lies at the heart of Human.  In Volume I, above, the interviewees consider love, women, work, and poverty. Volume II deals with war, forgiveness, homosexuality, family, and the afterlife. Happiness, education, disability, immigration, corruption, and the meaning of life are the concerns of the third volume . The interview segments are broken up by aerial sequences, reminiscent of the images in Arthus-Bertrand’s book, The Earth from Above. It’s a good reminder of how small we all are in the grand scheme of things. Appropriately, given the subject matter, and the director’s longtime interest in environmental issues, the filming and promotion were accomplished in the most sustainable way, with the support of the GoodPlanet Foundation and the United Carbon Action program. It would be lovely for all humanity if this is a feature of filmmaking going forward. The Google Cultural Institute has a collection of related material, from the making of the soundtrack to behind-the-scenes reminiscences of the interview team. Human will be added to our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her new play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Human: The Movie Features Interviews with 2,020 People from 60 Countries on What It Means to Be Human is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The fate of the visionary is to be forever outside of his or her time. Such was the life of Nikola Tesla, who dreamed the future while his opportunistic rival Thomas Edison seized the moment. Even now the name Tesla conjures seemingly wildly impractical ventures, too advanced, too expensive, or far too elegant in design for mass production and consumption. No one better than David Bowie, the pop artist of possibility, could embody Tesla’s air of magisterial high seriousness on the screen. And few were better suited than Tesla himself, perhaps, to extrapolate from his time to ours and see the technological future clearly. Of course, this image of Tesla as a lone, heroic, and even somewhat tragic figure who fell victim to Edison’s designs is a bit of a romantic exaggeration. As even the editor of a 1935 feature interview piece in the now-defunct Liberty magazine wrote, Tesla and Edison may have been rivals in the "battle between alternating and direct current…. Otherwise the two men were merely opposites. Edison had a genius for practical inventions immediately applicable. Tesla, whose inventions were far ahead of the time, aroused antagonisms which delayed the fruition of his ideas for years." One can in some respects see why Tesla "aroused antagonisms." He may have been a genius, but he was not a people person, and some of his views, though maybe characteristic of the times, are downright unsettling. In the lengthy Liberty essay, "as told to George Sylvester Viereck" (a poet and Nazi sympathizer who also interviewed Hitler), Tesla himself makes the pronouncement, "It seems that I have always been ahead of my time." He then goes on to enumerate some of the ways he has been proven right, and confidently lists the characteristics of the future as he sees it. No one likes a know-it-all, but Tesla refused to compromise or ingratiate himself, though he suffered for it professionally. And he was, in many cases, right. Many of his 1935 predictions in Liberty are still too far off to measure, and some of them will seem outlandish, or criminal, to us today. But some still seem plausible, and a few advisable if we are to make it another 100 years as a species. Tesla’s predictions include the following, which he introduces with the disclaimer that "forecasting is perilous. No man can look very far into the future." "Buddhism and Christianity… will be the religion of the human race in the twenty-first century." "The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established." Tesla went on to comment, "no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal." "Hygiene, physical culture will be recognized branches of education and government. The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2025 than the Secretary of War." Along with personal hygiene, Tesla included "pollution" as a social ill in need of regulation. "I am convinced that within a century coffee, tea, and tobacco will be no longer in vogue. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life." "There will be enough wheat and wheat products to feed the entire world, including the teeming millions of China and India." (Tesla did not foresee the anti-gluten mania of the 21st century.) "Long before the next century dawns, systematic reforestation and the scientific management of natural resources will have made an end of all devastating droughts, forest fires, and floods. The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power." Along with this optimistic prediction, Tesla foresaw that "the struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines." Tesla goes on to predict the elimination of war, "by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself," after which war chests would be diverted to funding education and research. He then describes—in rather fantastical-sounding terms—an apparatus that "projects particles" and transmits energy, enabling not only a revolution in defense technology, but "undreamed of results in television." Tesla diagnoses his time as one in which "we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age." The solution, he asserts—along with most futurists, then and now—"does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine." As an example of such mastery, Tesla describes the future of "automatons" taking over human labor and the creation of "a thinking machine." Matt Novak at the Smithsonian has analyzed many of Tesla’s claims, interpreting his predictions about "hygiene and physical culture" as a foreshadowing of the EPA and discussing Tesla’s work in robotics ("Today," Tesla proclaimed, "the robot is an accepted fact"). The Liberty article was not the first time Tesla had made large-scale, public predictions about the century to come and beyond. In 1926, Tesla gave an interview to Collier’s magazine in which he more or less accurately foresaw smartphones and wireless telephony and computing: When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.  Telsa also made some odd predictions about fuel-less passenger flying machines "free from any limitations of the present airplanes and dirigibles" and spouted more of the scary stuff about eugenics that had come to obsess him late in life. Additionally, Tesla saw changing gender relations as the precursor of a coming matriarchy. This was not a development he characterized in positive terms. For Tesla, feminism would "end in a new sex order, with the female as superior." (As Novak notes, Tesla’s misgivings about feminism have made him a hero to the so-called "men’s rights" movement.) While he fully granted that women could and would match and surpass men in every field, he warned that "the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women, their gradual usurpation of leadership, will dull and finally dissipate feminine sensibilities, will choke the maternal instinct, so that marriage and motherhood may become abhorrent and human civilization draw closer and closer to the perfect civilization of the bee." It seems to me that a "bee civilization" would appeal to a eugenicist, except, I suppose, Tesla feared becoming a drone. Although he saw the development as inevitable, he still sounds to me like any number of current politicians who argue that society should continue to suppress and discriminate against women for their own good and the good of "civilization." Tesla may be an outsider hero for geek culture everywhere, but his social attitudes give me the creeps. While I’ve personally always liked the vision of a world in which robots do most the work and we spend most of our money on education, when it comes to the elimination of war, I’m less sanguine about particle rays and more sympathetic to the words of Ivor Cutler. via Smithsonian/Paleofuture Related Content: Electric Photo of Nikola Tesla, 1899 Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It Mark Twain Plays With Electricity in Nikola Tesla’s Lab (Photo, 1894) Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal Publishes 28 Predictions for the Year 2000 Philip K. Dick Makes Off-the-Wall Predictions for the Future: Mars Colonies, Alien Viruses & More (1981) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee, The Rule of Eugenics (1926/35) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.