Nearly two years ago, The Snark Handbook: Insult Edition gave us high-brow verbal sparring lessons with some of literary history’s finest comebacks, taunts, and effronteries. Now, from educator April Gudenrath and the team at TED-Ed comes this primer on Shakespearean insults, which served to unify the audience and to develop relationships between characters in a very short and sharp way.

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

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Last week, we marveled at Harry Clarke’s haunting 1919 illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. That same year, Clarke also illustrated Poe’s beloved short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” — but as darkly beautiful as his artwork was, this imaginative 1953 animated adaptation gives Clarke more than a run for his money. Narrated by legendary English actor James Mason, it was the first cartoon to be X-rated in Great Britain under the British Board of Film Censors classification system.

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Whether we call it “rationality vs. intuition,” as Albert Einstein, Anne Lamott, and Steve Jobs did, or “reason vs. emotion,” being human means being bedeviled by the near-constant polar pull of two opposing forces. And yet, we’ve seen the “divided brain” is a reductionist myth, and perpetuating it has dangerous sociocultural consequences.

In 1943, however, the clear-cut dichotomy between reason and emotion was not only perfectly acceptable, it was also a perfectly exploitable propaganda talking point. This animated Disney short film, created the same year as the now-infamous Disney employee handbook, enlists the same comically appalling era-appropriate gender stereotypes to deliver a steady dose of wartime propaganda against the Axis, portrayed as governed by unreasonable emotion, which the Allies could combat with the force of reason and restrained emotion.

As amusing as the gender treatment might be in its appallingness, one particularly appalling chasm is what happens to each gender when its bearer is possessed by emotion and negligent of reason: The man merely gets his sexual advances met with a slap, whereas the woman spirals into food binges, which promise an undesirable body, which in turn makes her unworthy of said sexual advances. In other words, reason ultimately serves the man in both scenarios, while emotion merely distracts from his most desirable outcome.

Of course, the analysis of what any of this has to do with going to war is best left to Freud.

For a similar look at wartime propaganda from the other end of the world, see this collection of vintage Russian animated propaganda.

↬ Open Culture

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In 1946, Columbia University anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish published a pamphlet intended for American troops, entitled The Races of Mankind, which presented in simple language and cartoon illustrations a scientific case against racism. That same year, the pamphlet was adapted in the lovely animated short film The Brotherhood of Man, which makes a humorous but articulate case for equality despite physical dissimilarity and argues for extending to all people “an equal chance in life.”

How civilized a person is depends on the surroundings in which he grows up. The differences in the ways people behave are not inherited from their ancestors.

The pamphlet is now in the public domain and is thus available in its entirety, courtesy of The Internet Archive. It’s worth it if only for the wonderful illustrations.

UPDATE: Reader Jesse Jarnow (son of the great Al Jarnow) points out that The Brotherhood of Man is the work of legendary animator John Hubley, previously featured here.

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From German photographer and designer Marcel Schindler comes the best adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea since that Russian father-and-son duo’s animation finger-painted on glass — a lovely hand-illustrated stop-motion in a style reminiscent of Flash Rosenberg’s and the now-classic RSA animations, and a worthy addition to the finest literary art projects.

↬ Coudal

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Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget is arguably the most influential scholar of children’s moral development. In the 1960s, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg built upon Piaget’s work with his own theory on the stages of moral development. Much of his reasoning was based on the Heinz dilemma, which explores how people justify and rationalize their actions when placed in similar moral quandaries.

This cleverly conceived and beautifully executed interactive video by Carlo Pisani, Andres Jud, and Maria Stalder offers a simplified version of the Heinz dilemma to test for moral development by asking you, the viewer, to choose one of several scenarios that would solve Heinz’s predicament. It then “diagnoses” you with one of the three stages of moral development — pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional. (For the interactivity to work, make sure YouTube annotations are set to “on.”)

For a related treat, see Open University’s six famous philosophy thought experiments, animated in 60 seconds each.

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Last week, Jonah Lehrer took us inside “the seething cauldron of ideas” with Imagine: How Creativity Works, his long-awaited (by me, at least) new book. Now, from Flash Rosenberg — Guggenheim Fellow, NYPL artist-in-residence, live-illustrator extraordinaire, and Brain Pickings darling — comes this wonderful hand-drawn teaser for the book, distilling one of Lehrer’s key ideas in Rosenberg’s signature style of simple yet visually eloquent line drawings.

When we tell stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem was impossible. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthrough. We tell the happy ending first.

The danger of this scenario is that the act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.

For a related treat, see Rosenberg’s live-illustration of John Lithgow reading Mark Twin at the New York Public Library.

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“Use the right word, not its second cousin,” Mark Twain admonished. “Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs,” David Ogilvy advised.

Last week, my friends at TED launched TED-Ed — a wonderful new series of short animated videos for high school students and lifelong learners, using visual storytelling to deliver compelling messages in equally compelling ways. To kick off, this lovely video by copywriter Terin Izil, animated by the one and only Sunni Brown (remember her?), makes an appropriately succinct case for using simple words and brevity in writing, in just two minutes.

Variety may be the spice of life, but brevity is its bread and butter. So when it comes to $10 words, save your money and buy a Scrabble board.”

Then again, even E.B. White — the quintessential champion of brevity — felt compelled to play devil’s advocate against brevity for brevity’s sake:

Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound. How about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’? One tomorrow would suffice, but it’s the other two that have made the thing immortal.”

↬ Show Us Your Clips

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In 1968, Russian animator Fyodor Khitruk — best-known for the Russian animated adaptation of Winnie the Pooh and his 1962 gem, Story of a Crime — set out to parody the ego-driven, bureaucratic world of Soviet cinema. The result was Film, Film, Film — a satirical short film telling the story of how a historical movie is made through near-silent pantomime. Its aesthetic — a dynamic mix of minimalist yet provocative image and typography — is somehow reminiscent of the Information Age visual vernacular Marshall McLuhan and designer Quentin Fiore were crafting on the other side of the Iron Curtain around the same time.

Part two continues below:

Film, Film, Film, along with other groundbreaking animated shorts from Russian animation pioneers, can be found on Masters Of Russian Animation — a remarkable collection of animated shorts from the 1960s through 1980s in four volumes.

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I remain fascinated by time — its science, its visual representation, its subjective perception, its philosophical dimension. This wonderful short video from Minute Physics, based on Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, explores one of the most mind-bending questions about time: what makes the past different from the future?

Every difference between the past and the future can ultimately be traced to the fact that the entropy was lower in the past and is growing — that’s the second law of thermodynamics: the universe was orderly, and is becoming more disorderly.

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