One of the reasons why I’m making this post is because I’ve recently enjoyed listening to a few film critics complain about how disappointing modern films are. I think that I should point out that the job of the overwhelming majority of film critics in the USA, and in the rest of the West, is to support the film industry and to repeat establishment propaganda. This isn’t really anything new. This has always been the case. Even many of the film critics that appear to be independent aren’t really independent because they know that if they oppose the establishment line completely they won’t have opportunities to get ahead and to get their works released for wide distribution. Therefore, even the critics that seem to dislike modern Hollywood cinema still kind of support it by telling people to go and see some films in theaters. Is being a film critic one of the worst jobs now? Seeing one bland film after another for a whole year, year after year, and then having to review such films must take a toll. Well, I doubt that this kind of existence leads film critics to thoughts of suicide, but it still reflects in their reviews sometimes. I can bring up Roger Ebert as an example. Ebert was criticized by some people later in his career because he began to often award films with high ratings exactly when Hollywood cinema began to go into a creative slump, in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Early in his career, he was much harder on films, including on films that are now considered to be classics. Ebert did criticize modern Hollywood cinema in more than one book, but I think that he still awarded perfect ratings to many modern films that didn’t deserve them, such as Argo (2012). I’m not calling Ebert a bad or dishonest critic. I think rather highly of him. I enjoyed reading his reviews and books. For example, when I sent him a message about the film Come And See (1985), he watched it and then included it on his list of the great movies. That was nice of him. But it’s worth pointing out that he sometimes got political in his reviews, and, because of his status as a famous critic, he had to support the film industry by continuing to praise some Hollywood films even though they didn’t really deserve praise. Anyway, I don’t much care for what film critics have to say because of a number of reasons. This doesn’t mean that I completely ignore the writings of film critics because even the bought and paid for film critics have something interesting to say from time to time, but their opinions aren’t like mantra for me. It’s worth noting that when I was in my late-teens and early-twenties I was more willing to see new films and to read the opinions of film critics, mostly because I wasn’t as knowledgeable back then as I am now. With all of this in mind, I have to say that I don’t have a hatred of modern Hollywood. I’ve already pointed out a few times on my blog that modern cinema in the West is bland and that it lacks quality, but, when I say that I don’t want to see a film again, this doesn’t mean that I hate it. This simply means that it doesn’t have replay value for me. Numerous films that got made before the 2000s arrived have replay value for me. In these films, the music, the cinematography, the acting, the direction, and other aspects mixed into a very appealing whole. Even the black & white films that got made before the 1960s arrived have cinematography that looks lovely. Nowadays, films with beautiful cinematography are a rarity, and, if it is present, it’s present almost exclusively in animated films. So, it seems that people that make animated films in the USA are more passionate and more skilled than people that make live-action films. American animation studios still manage to deliver good films almost every year. Anyway, I have to say that almost none of the films that got released in 2022 and 2023 disappointed me. But it’s also worth mentioning that almost none of them have replay value for me. I know that I criticized Top Gun: Maverick (2022) a little in one of my posts, but this doesn’t mean that I hate this film. I already explained why it doesn’t appeal to me as much as Top Gun (1986). Top Gun: Maverick is obviously one of the best films of 2022, and there’s plenty to like about it. It’s worth mentioning that Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), which is another film that Tom Cruise starred in, is one of the best films of 2023. As I’ve already pointed out in an earlier post, the summer of 2023 was crammed with enjoyable films from Hollywood, although the only new film from that period that has replay value for me is Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse. Avatar: The Way Of Water, which I got to see several months after it was released in theaters, turned out to be surprisingly good, although I must say that I didn’t like a few aspects of this film. I understand why the director James Cameron bragged about the special effects of this film because they are indeed excellent. Avatar: The Way Of Water is an entertaining film, and, even with its running time of over 3 hours, the time went by very quickly for me. All in all, Avatar: The Way Of Water is one of the best films of 2022, but I think that it doesn’t appeal to me as much as Avatar (2009) because there are some issues with the characters, the script, and the plot. Avatar: The Way Of Water can also be considered to be a return to form for Cameron because he hasn’t made a film this entertaining and this action-packed since Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). So, I got to see more than a dozen films from 2022, and most of them are critically-acclaimed. But do any of them have replay value for me? I would say no. It seems that 2023 was a somewhat better year for cinema because at least two of the films that I got to see have replay value for me. These two films are Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse and The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes. I must say, however, that I didn’t see every critically-acclaimed film from 2023. Perhaps I will spend some time in the future in order to see more films from 2023. But, again, 2023 wasn’t some great year for cinema. It was just another typical year for modern Hollywood. I kind of enjoyed seeing almost every film that I got to see, but spending my time on doing something else, like seeing old films and television shows, would have been a lot better. I had no interest whatsoever in the Barbenheimer cultural phenomenon, which turned both Barbie and Oppenheimer into some of the highest-grossing films of 2023. Perhaps if J. Robert Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see this phenomenon, he really would have wanted to blow up the world. So, thanks to the term Barbenheimer, and to all of the talk that developed around it, two average films got a major boost in 2023. I’ve already seen Oppenheimer, but I haven’t yet finished watching Barbie, and I’m in no hurry to do so. I must say that Oppenheimer wasn’t really a disappointing viewing experience for me, but it also wasn’t something that impressed me. When it comes to Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking, my opinion is neutral. There are aspects of his filmmaking that I like and there are aspects that I don’t like. Oppenheimer is a rather dull-looking biographical thriller. The cinematography of this film doesn’t really appeal to me. It seems like no attempt was made in order to make the early 20th century, which is the time when the story of the film takes place, look interesting or even somewhat glamorous. For example, I just finished watching A Passage To India (1984), which is a historical film too, and I can say that it looks much better than Oppenheimer, even though the story takes place mostly in India. The presence of several famous modern actors in Oppenheimer distracted me. I think that Cillian Murphy is good in the main role, but I can’t say the same about the performances of the other actors. After one viewing of this film, I can say that their performances are fine, I suppose. Nolan did succeed in making Oppenheimer an entertaining film. This effort is reflected in the poster of the film, which makes a theoretical physicist and a bomb look thrilling. Well, J. Robert Oppenheimer himself was an interesting personality. Although I have some complaints when it comes to Oppenheimer, I can say that it’s easily one of the best films of 2023, but I don’t have an urge to see it again. My favorite scene in the film is the one in which Oppenheimer talks to Harry S. Truman, who’s played by Gary Oldman. I should point out that one of the big reasons why I usually don’t look forward to going to a theater is the unpleasant experience of going to a theater nowadays. The center of Vancouver, which is the area where it’s most convenient for me to go to a theater, has become a repellent place in the last several years. The center of Vancouver is now an overcrowded and filthy place that’s full of homeless people and facilities that don’t work. There are mentally ill or mentally unstable people wandering about. Prices have risen for everything that’s sold in stores. Some of my favorite stores have closed down in the last decade. Well, Vancouver isn’t as bad as Detroit or Neo-Tokyo yet, but, nowadays, I keep on thinking if getting attacked by a pack of unemployed Canadian hockey players (or by any other pack of neurotypicals) is a possibility or not while I’m in the city. These are actually some of the signs that Canada and other states in the West are in a crisis. When a state or an empire is in crisis or in decline, overcrowding, deterioration, and cultural degradation take place. I’m currently reading ‘The Mind Alive Encyclopedia: Early Civilization’ by Jane Brown. This book has already become one of my favorites in my book collection. In the chapter about Harappa, it’s written, “The end of the cities was abrupt and violent, but they had been falling away for some time from their earlier standards. There are smaller houses and even pottery kilns encroaching on the streets, and everywhere there are signs of overcrowding and deterioration. But Mohenjo-daro was apparently sacked and burnt in a final overwhelming attack. Men, women and children were massacred in the streets and houses and were left lying – a fairly sure sign that the city was at least temporarily abandoned. In one lane are nine skeletons, including five children, and in another place several people were apparently climbing steps from a well-room to the street when they were knocked over backwards and fell dead at the bottom of the steps. The weight and probability suggests that these invaders were the first wave of Aryans, whose onslaughts on the cities of the aborigines are celebrated in the Vedas. If so, then the peak of the Harappan civilization may be placed between 2500 and 1500 BC and its destruction at about 1500. We must hope that one day the decipherment of its script will tell us more about this enigmatic civilization.” In contrast, in a chapter about Rome, it’s written, “Augustus brought dignity to Rome’s public life. He rebuilt and beautified the city, claiming in later life that he had found it a city of brick and left it a city of marble. He encouraged the arts and patronized writers like Virgil, Livy and Horace, who glorified the destiny of Rome. Under Augustus, Rome’s population grew to more than a million. Its citizens enjoyed a water supply, clean streets, and amenities that were not to be equalled for another 1,500 years. Augustus left Rome with an empire that covered most of the Western world. An army of 300,000 men kept peace and order throughout every province, and good roads promoted the prosperity of the Empire. Later, men called the reign of Augustus the golden age of the Roman Empire. After his death Augustus was regarded as a god, and later emperors, following the custom of the East, became gods while they still lived.” Anyway, what’s also worth adding is that the number of theaters in the center of the city has shrunk in the last two decades. Empire Theatres, which was a movie theater chain in Canada, no longer exists. One of its theaters, Empire Granville 7 Cinemas, closed in 2012. This theater was my favorite in Vancouver, and, after it closed for good, the experience of going to see a film in a theater has become less appealing to me. The quality of management at the theaters that still exist has clearly deteriorated in the last several years. Well, at least the washrooms in these theaters are still working like before, at least most of the time. I must say, however, that besides a few very good films that got released in 2023, there was another bright spot in 2023. This bright spot consisted of the several films that got made by DC Studios. Since Marvel Studios failed to deliver at least a few enjoyable films in 2023, what DC Studios put out brought some fun to me in theaters last year. That is, in 2023, DC Studios managed to do what Marvel Studios did very well in earlier years, which is to release at least a few enjoyable films in theaters in one year. Sure, what DC Studios managed to pump out in 2023 isn’t as good as the best that Marvel Studios has to offer, but I still enjoyed seeing every DC Studios film last year. When it comes to Marvel Studios, there were two very good releases (Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 and Loki season 2) and three disappointing releases (Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels, and Secret Invasion). I think that season 2 of Loki is the best TV show that Marvel has made so far. I didn’t expect for it to be as good as it is. Unfortunately, when it comes to films, Marvel continues to disappoint. While the TV shows that Marvel has been making have almost all been good, the films are another matter. The people that got assigned to make Thor: Love And Thunder, Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, and The Marvels really dropped the ball, and I must say that these films left a bad taste in my mouth. Well, at least Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania features a good music score by Christophe Beck. So, 2023 was the worst year yet for Marvel Studios. Of course, I never expected Marvel Studios to continue to deliver one enjoyable product after another. All good things come to an end eventually. The films of The Infinity Saga have made Marvel Studios so successful and so popular that now every amateur film critic and every jackass on the internet yaps about what Marvel puts out. Contrary to what some people say, however, there wasn’t some Marvel apocalypse in 2023 because Marvel Studios still released a very good film and a very good TV show in that year. Since I’m not some amateur internet film critic that tries to earn as much money as possible on YouTube by making provocative videos, and since I’m not some nerd that goes to a movie theater every other day or every week, all of the talk about the fall of Marvel doesn’t interest me. Even if Marvel Studios doesn’t repeat its past success, I won’t be heartbroken because there are plenty of other films and TV shows to watch. Perhaps the biggest reason why I wanted to make this post was to point out that I had a good deal of fun when I watched some old films that I’ve seen before. These films brought a lot more enjoyment to me than any of the films that I got to see in theaters lately, for obvious reasons. Ghost Story (1981) is the film that I enjoyed watching the most because of its cinematography and because it has a number of inspired scenes, like when Edward Wanderley sees a female apparition during a snowstorm and falls to his death. I enjoyed watching The Changeling (1980) almost as much because it too has no shortage of memorable scenes, like the one when John Russell holds a seance and overhears the voice of a spirit on audio equipment. Another film that came alive for me when I watched it again recently is Flashdance (1983). It has charming cinematography, and Donald Peterman was nominated for an Academy Award because of his work on Flashdance. I think that one of the reasons why Flashdance became very successful is because it’s an inspirational film. Jennifer Beals appealed very much to me this time in the role of Alex Owens. I got to see The Exorcist (1973) in a theater several months ago, and I realized that it’s now one of those films that I can watch again and again, just like Predator (1987) and A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984).

When it comes to living your best life, Albert Einstein — notorious as the greatest physicist and genius of his time, and possibly of all-time — probably isn’t the first name you think of in terms of life advice. You most likely know of Einstein as a pioneer in revolutionizing how we perceive the Universe, having given us advances such as:

• the constancy of the speed of light,
• the fact that distances and times are not absolute, but relative for each and every observer,
• his most famous equation, E = mc²,
• the photoelectric effect,
• the theory of gravity, general relativity, that overthrew Newtonian gravity,
• and Einstein-Rosen bridges, or as they’re better known, wormholes.

But Einstein was more than just a famous physicist: he was a pacifist, a political activist, an active anti-racist, and one of the most iconic and celebrated figures in all of history.

He was also known for his unconventional behavior in a variety of ways that flouted social norms, including his unkempt hair, his witty humor, and his unrelenting hatred of socks. But less well-known is Einstein’s freely-given life advice to many of his friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries, which are perhaps even more relevant today, in the 21st century, than when he initially doled out his words of wisdom and compassion. Taken from the book The Einstein Effect, written by the official social media manager of the Einstein estate, Benyamin Cohen, these rules for a better life go far beyond physics and are relevant to us all. Here are, perhaps, the best and most universally applicable lessons from Einstein himself.

Rule #1: Expend your efforts on the things that matter.

When you think of Einstein’s appearance, the word “disheveled” may come to mind. His overgrown, uncombed hair, his ratty, worn-out, often smelly clothing, his shoes without socks, etc., all were notoriously slovenly. But none of that bothered Einstein, who in his later years wore what could be considered almost a uniform: a signature grey suit, sans the traditional sport coat, with a leather jacket in its place. (And, of course, with shoes and no socks.)

This idea, of wearing simple but functional clothing that puts the wearer at ease with themselves, has been made famous in recent years by tech entrepreneurs who have their own signature style:

• Steve Jobs and his infamous blue jeans and black turtlenecks (a style copied by Elizabeth Holmes),
• Jeff Bezos, who wears blue jeans with short-sleeve, monochrome, collared shirts,
• Mark Zuckerberg, who prefers blue jeans and T-shirts,
• Satya Nadella, who typically wears slacks, polo shirts, and Lanvin shoes,
• and Jack Dorsey, whose all-black outfits often include a hat, hoodie, or jacket,

It is prized for one reason above all others: efficiency.

If you have a lot of decisions to make each day, or a lot of work that requires mental effort in any sense, cutting down on your overall mental load is of paramount importance if you want to avoid what’s known as decision fatigue: where our ability to make good decisions degrades as we become more tired from relentlessly having to make choices.

As fashion journalist Elyssa Goodman wrote, “Uniform dressing has roots in not just physical but mental efficiency. People who have to make immense decisions every day will sometimes choose a consistent ensemble because it allows them to avoid decision fatigue, where making too many unrelated decisions can actually cause one’s productivity to fall off.”

It’s a way to economize your efforts: to put them where they’re most needed, at the expense of not wasting them on spurious or unimportant matters. In other words, choosing not to put effort into the things that are superfluous to what’s actually important to you is a way to become more mentally efficient, which frees up your mind to focus on what actually matters most to you. Einstein’s lack of effort into his personal presentation extended to his disdain for going to the barber, as well as his often nearly-illegible penmanship. But the rewards, of focusing his mind on what was truly important to him, led him to a rich, fulfilling life.

Rule #2: Do things you love, even if you’re terrible at them.

While many of Einstein’s passions extended far beyond physics — including a love of baked goods and a penchant for playing the violin — perhaps the one he enjoyed the most was sailing. As Einstein wrote, “A cruise in the sea is an excellent opportunity for maximum calm and reflection on ideas from a different perspective.” His second wife (and cousin), Elsa, added that “There is no other place where my husband is so relaxed, sweet, serene, and detached from routine distractions; the ship carries him far away.” By focusing on something mundane, Einstein’s mind was free to wander, frequently leading him to exciting new ideas.

Einstein, however, was completely inept at sailing, and was at best a wildly inattentive sailor. He would frequently lose his direction, run his boat aground, or have his mast fall. Other sailing vessels frequently had to beware of Einstein’s ship, as he was a hazard to himself and others, refusing to wear a life vest despite being unable to swim. Boaters and even children routinely rescued him, and having his boat towed back to shore was a frequent occurrence. But the serenity Einstein experienced while sailing was unparalleled, giving him a mental freedom that we should all aspire to for ourselves.

Rule #3: Have a puzzle mindset.

Think about the problems that we face, both as individuals and collectively, as a civilization. These could be financial, environmental, health-related, or political, for example, as those arenas affect us all. Do you view these problems as crises? If you do, you probably feel despair at them, as there’s very little that’s empowering about facing a crisis. But if you view them as a puzzle, you might be inclined to think about a fresh approach to solving them. In this regard, Einstein was pretty much the prototype individual for someone who viewed every difficulty he faced as a puzzle to be solved: in physics and beyond.

Consider his oft-misunderstood but most famous quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” While many people had looked at the puzzle of objects moving near the speed of light before — including other geniuses like FitzGerald, Maxwell, Lorentz, and Poincaré — it was Einstein’s unique perspective that allowed him to approach that problem in a way that led him to the revolution of special relativity. With a flexible, non-rigid worldview, Einstein would easily challenge assumptions that others couldn’t move past, allowing him to conceive of ideas that others would unceremoniously reject out-of-hand.

Einstein was no stranger to having strongly held convictions about both life and physical reality, but each of his opinions, even those he was most certain of, were no more sacred to him than a mundane hypothesis. When one has a hypothesis, or idea, the goal isn’t simply to find out whether that hypothesis is right or wrong; in some sense, that’s the least interesting part of the endeavor. The search for the answers, including figuring out how to perform the critical test and interrogate the Universe itself in an effective manner, was what truly got Einstein excited.

His thought-experiments were among the most creative approaches ever taken by physicists, and that line of thought has been adopted by a great many scientists ever since who wish to avoid what’s known as cognitive entrenchment. What would a light-wave look like if you could follow it by traveling at the same speed it traveled at? How would the light from a distant star be deflected by the Sun’s gravity during a total solar eclipse? What experiments could one perform to determine whether our quantum reality is pre-determined by variables we cannot observe directly? Unlike a preacher who claims to be infallible, a prosecutor who wants to convince you of their perspective, or a politician who just wants to win your approval, having a puzzle mindset — i.e., the mind of a scientist — is the only one that can lead you to novel discoveries, including quite unexpected ones.

Rule #4: Think deeply, both long and hard, about things that truly fascinate you.

Over the course of his long life, Einstein received many letters: from those who knew him well to perfect strangers. When one such letter arrived on Einstein’s desk in 1946, asking the genius what they should do with their life, the response was as astute as it was compassionate. “The main thing is this. If you have come across a question that interests you deeply, stick to it for years and do never try to content yourself with the solution of superficial problems promising relatively easy success.”

And if you fail to arrive at the solution you’ve been chasing, don’t despair. As Einstein wrote to his friend David Bohm, “You should not be depressed by the enormity of the problem. If God has created the world, his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us.” Although Einstein was most famous for the problems he did solve, there were plenty whose solutions eluded him all his life: from finding a deterministic explanation for the observed quantum behavior to the attempt to unify all of physics (including gravity and the other forces) into one overarching framework.

Although many have tried-and-failed (and continue to try-and-fail) to solve these and other puzzles, the greatest joy and fulfillment is often to be found in the struggle itself.

Rule #5: Don’t let politics fill you with either rage or despair.

Einstein kept up with many friends and members of the public, but also with his extended family. In correspondence with his cousin Lina Einstein, he offered a lesson that many of us would do well to heed. “About politics to be sure, I still get dutifully angry, but I do not bat my wings anymore, I only ruffle my feathers.”

How many of us have seen a friend, acquaintance, or even total stranger make a statement that filled us with outrage, and flew off the handle, filled with righteous indignation, and launched into a tirade as a result? While that might fulfill some primitive need in us to speak our mind and challenge what we see as an unacceptable narrative, how often was such a response actually effective in achieving any of our goals?

Sometimes, it truly is important to intervene and go all-out: what Einstein refers to as “batting our wings.” But at other times, in a lesson that King Bumi from Avatar: The Last Airbender would heartily approve of, sometimes the best response is to sit back, observe, think, and wait for the opportune, strategic moment to take action down the road: “ruffling our feathers” for the time being.

Rule #6: Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of the truth.

Many of us, upon hearing something that we are certain is either absurd, flawed, or hopelessly corrupt, immediately and vociferously make up our minds to oppose them, regardless of what the full suite of evidence actually indicates. Once we abandon our critical thinking faculties because we are certain we know the answer, we tend to simply go along with those who agree with us and oppose those who espouse anything different. To Einstein, this represented the death of the rational mind, which he called “collective insanity” or a “herd mind.” Today, we would likely call it groupthink, and Einstein noted that it was often driven by a prominent figure spouting propaganda.

Scientists, including formerly reputable ones like Johannes Stark (Nobel Laureate and founder of the Stark effect), formed an anti-relativity society that discredited Einstein and his theory. Fueled by nationalism and anti-semitism, Einstein and his ideas became a target, with one line of attack claiming relativity was wrong and dangerous, and another line claiming it was brilliant but that Einstein stole the idea from “real” (non-Jewish) scientists. It was this course of action that eventually led to Einstein having a bounty placed on his head, leading to him fleeing Germany for the United States. While Einstein initially thought these machinations were silly, ridiculous, and harmless, he later concluded that “Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of the truth.” In the era of fake news, this lesson is more important to assimilate than ever.

Rule #7: Science, truth, and education are for everyone, not just the privileged few.

Einstein was often very critical of the United States Government, even after emigrating in the 1930s and gaining his citizenship in 1940. The history of slavery and ongoing segregation and racism, in particular, resonated with him the same way that anti-Semitism did: as fundamentally dehumanizing as it was baseless. The FBI began a file on Einstein in 1932, and it had burgeoned to more than 1400 pages by the time Einstein died in 1955, and Einstein’s anti-racist actions were deemed fundamentally un-American by many (including Senator Joseph McCarthy), but Einstein would not be deterred.

In 1937, Einstein invited black opera star Marion Anderson to stay at his house when she was refused lodging at the local (segregated) hotel in Princeton. In 1946, Einstein took the revolutionary action of simply visiting Lincoln University — the first degree-granting black college in the United States — and lectured, speaking with students and answering questions. Delivering an address to the student body, Einstein said:

“My trip to this institution was on behalf of a worthwhile cause. There is a separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It’s a disease of white people.”

In 1953, Einstein defended the academic freedom of William Frauenglass, a teacher who taught about easing interracial tensions, in a letter published by The New York Times. The following year, he further pushed for “the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true.” In this day and age, we can be certain that Einstein would have pushed for science, truth, and education to be available to everyone. While certain physical properties may be relative, like space and time, the joys, knowledge, and truths uncovered by science belong to no one race, nation, or faction, but rather to all of humanity.

On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. It had a band around its leg, but where it came from, or was meant to be headed, no one could say. While management debated what to do, a maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla.

The 78-year-old inventor quickly volunteered to take in the homeless pigeon.

“Dr. Tesla … dropped work on a new electrical project, lest his charge require some little attention,” reported The New York Times. “The man who recently announced the discovery of an electrical death-beam, powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a swoop, carefully spread towels on his window ledge and set down a little cup of seed.”

Nikola Tesla—the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil—had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. In the dark, he’d sound a low whistle, and from the gloom, hordes of pigeons would flock to the old man, perching on his outstretched arms. He was known to keep baskets in his room as nests, along with caches of homemade seed mix, and to leave his windows perpetually open so the birds could come and go. Once, he was arrested for trying to lasso an injured homing pigeon in the plaza of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and, from his holding cell in the 34th Street precinct, had to convince the officers that he was—or had been—one of the most famous inventors in the world.

It had been years since he’d produced a successful invention. He was gaunt and broke—living off of debt and good graces—having been kicked out of a string of hotels, a trail of pigeon droppings and unpaid rent in his wake. He had no family or close friends, except for the birds.

And one in particular.

He told his biographer, John O’Neill, the story himself. “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years,” Tesla said. “But there was one pigeon, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere. No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her. I loved that pigeon.”

“Yes,” he continued, “I loved that pigeon.”

Tesla said that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind, and that sometimes, as they silently conversed, beams of light would shoot from her eyes.

It would be easy to dismiss the pigeon chapter of Tesla’s life as a bizarre or pathetic turn of events: the once-great engineer who wowed the world with dazzling displays of electricity, whose inventions shaped the way currents ran through our cities and electrified our homes, descending into loneliness or madness, believing himself to be in a romantic relationship with a telepathic bird.

But in doing so, we’d miss something critical. For it wasn’t really a turn of events at all. In a way, they were all of a piece—the blazing currents, the ingenious inventions, the notion of conversing mind to mind—in a moment in time when the universe suddenly had been turned on its head, when the discovery of invisible waves from the electromagnetic spectrum opened up strange new spaces, and the line between the possible and the impossible cut the shape of a wing.

Tesla’s love of pigeons was an obsession with a capital O. Likely followed by a capital C and a capital D. He seems to have suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, and his case was severe. As a child, he described, “I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits.” Dislikes included: anything too round (“the sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit”; “I would get a fever by looking at a peach”) and touching another person’s hair (“except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver”). Likes included: doing things in threes (hence his hotel room on the 33rd floor). As for habits, there was counting: the steps in his walks, the cubical contents of his soup. “If I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again,” he recalled, “even if it took hours.”

He was, from an early age, tormented by intrusive thoughts, a textbook symptom of OCD, though his were extreme: ideas and images that gripped his mind with such unrelenting force they bordered on hallucination. They were often accompanied by flashes of light, the air around him “filled with tongues of living flame.” At times, Tesla’s perceptions seemed to be amplified. “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear,” he wrote in his autobiography.

These experiences shaped the way Tesla thought about thought itself. Because he had little control over them, he felt them to be coming from the outside, as if he were picking up unwanted signals from the world around him. Soon he grew convinced that all thought came from the outside—that our brains pluck images, ideas, and inventions from the environment. “The brain is not an accumulator as commonly held in philosophy,” he decided, “and contains no records whatever of a phonographic or photographic kind. … The brain has merely the quality to respond.” If only he could figure out how the brain decides which signals to tune into and which to keep out or why some were magnified to such terrifying proportions, he thought, we might finally understand the workings of the mind, and he might finally feel connected to other people and at home in the world.

As a young man Tesla’s mind was widely celebrated as among the brightest of his time. At 26 years old in 1882, Tesla conceived of the alternating-current motor. When it was perfected and built six years later, Tesla’s motor completely redefined how one could use electric currents to induce motion.

Existing motors required mechanical parts to keep their rotors turning in one direction. Those parts were subject to friction—they sparked and wore down; they were a drag on efficiency. In an epiphany, Tesla realized that he could replace those physical parts with electrical currents. Most engineers at the time worked with direct current, which flows in one direction, but Tesla saw the potential of alternating currents, which reverse directions, flowing back and forth. The key, he realized, was to use multiple alternating currents that were out of step with one another. That way, their voltages could cancel out at just the right moments to produce a combined magnetic field that would steadily rotate, causing the rotor to spin. The relationship between currents could do the work of a machine.

“It was a fundamentally brilliant insight,” says W. Bernard Carlson, a historian of technology at the University of Virginia. “To this day, all alternating current motors, whether in the hard drive of your computer or your refrigerator or an elevator, follow the same basic principle. Before Tesla, you only had electric lighting. After Tesla, you could have electric light and power.”

Tesla, though, had something much bigger in mind. It began with the Tesla coil, which he designed in 1891. He had set out to create an induction coil (a device in which the electrical current in one coil of wire induces a current in a second coil of wire) when he realized what would happen if this time the currents were in sync. By adjusting the lengths of the coils so that their electrical vibrations aligned, Tesla discharged a rip-roaring spark.

This was the phenomenon of resonance—the same principle that explains how tuning forks ring and sympathetic pendulums swing, why there’s music in the harmony of the spheres. Tesla turned it into an engineering principle. And he saw that it stood to solve a problem that was vexing science.

In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism, showing that visible light was an electromagnetic vibration—and that there could be others. Only with the discovery of radio waves by Heinrich Hertz, in 1888, did it dawn on scientists that there existed an entire electromagnetic spectrum that was, in principle, infinitely vast. At the lowest end of the known range, radio wavelengths could span the planet, while a wavelength of visible light might be 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and gamma rays, in the upper register, vibrated on the scale of atomic nuclei. Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1895 discovery of X-rays only furthered scientists’ feeling that the universe had cracked open and that a brave new world was spilling out. The British newspaper The Standard reported that “the universe was full of different sorts of vibrations, of which [scientists] had not the remotest knowledge or slightest suspicion”—waves that could cut through a London fog, and rays that could pass through buildings and bone.

In a few short years, the world had grown infinitely richer, full of mysterious new possibilities. The question was how to access and utilize those vibrations. What was needed, said physicist William Crookes, who did pioneering work on electron beams, were “more receivers which will respond to wavelengths between certain defined limits and be silent to all others.” This, he said, is “the most difficult of the problems to be solved.”

Tesla saw the solution in resonance. When the alternating currents in his coils vibrated in sync, they not only produced sizzling sparks, they also emitted radio waves—attach an antenna and you’ve got yourself a radio transmitter. By tuning the coils, Tesla could choose the frequency of the emitted waves. In turn, those tuned coils, exposed to radiation coming in through the antenna, would only respond to waves of the resonant frequency. The Tesla coil could serve as a tuned receiver.

“Tesla was one of the first to really understand this idea of tuning,” Carlson says. “His big insight was that radio waves could be resonant phenomena.” Tesla’s coil was a potential solution not only to Crooke’s problem but also, Tesla hoped, to his own—to the problem of how his brain tuned in to the world.

The study of electricity and the nervous system had always gone hand in hand. The first measurements of moving current were made in the 18th century by Luigi Galvani, who connected a frog’s nerve to a long metal wire and held it up to a stormy sky, channeling electricity from the air; when lightning flashed, the frog’s muscles contracted. Alessandro Volta modeled the first battery on the nerves of the electric eel; Samuel Morse used that battery to power his electric telegraph lines, then turned right back around and compared his telegraph to living nerves. An 1837 article in The Scotsman expounded on the possibilities of cities linked by “electric nerves”: “Men a thousand miles from each other would be enabled to confer as if they were in the same apartment, or to read each other’s thoughts as if they were in the sky.”

Just as the first electrically coded messages were being sent along telegraph wires in the 1840s, the first precise measurements of electrical activity in neurons were being made. So when Hertz discovered radio waves traveling wirelessly through the air, a new neural concept suddenly became possible; perhaps there were also “brain waves.”

If accelerating charges in a wire could induce wireless vibrations in the ether, scientists thought, surely sparks in neurons could, too. “Brain waves are fashionable in London at this moment,” read an 1897 edition of the Boston Evening Transcript, reporting on remarks by Crookes. “His brain wave theory is only an extension of the law governing the vibrations of sound and light.” The idea was that somewhere in the vast and unexplored electromagnetic spectrum one could find thought.

“The discovery of wireless radio made people rethink the basic ideas of consciousness,” says Anthony Enns, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who studies the history of technology and its relation to pseudoscience. “Crookes was fascinated by the idea of the brain as a kind of radio transmitter and receiver,” while Oliver Lodge, one of the pioneers of radio, “saw consciousness as a kind of energy field that was not located in the brain but surrounded the brain.” If thoughts generated brain waves, why couldn’t other minds pick them up? “The air is as full of brain waves as it is of sunbeams and starlight,” penned one newspaper reporter of the time.

The distance between humans seemed to be shrinking, and the possibility of thought transference seemed an increasingly natural outcome of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. The writer Mark Twain who was known to hang out in Tesla’s lab, told Harper’s Monthly:

The telegraph and the telephone are going to become too slow and wordy for our needs. We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance. … Doubtless the something which conveys our thoughts through the air from brain to brain is a finer and subtler form of electricity, and all we need to do is find out how to capture it and how to force it to do its work, as we have had to do in the case of electric currents. Before the day of telegraphs, neither one of these marvels would have seemed any easier to achieve than the other.

The great inventors were hard at work, trying to be the first to build this mental telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell, for one, constructed helmets made of coiled wires, which two people could wear, one transferring their thoughts to the other. The result? “The thought in one brain has produced a sensation in the other, through the two helmets, but what the relation was between the thought and the sensation could not be determined,” Bell reported to McClure’s Magazine at the time.

Tesla proposed a technology that went beyond transmitting mere thoughts. He called it “television”—not to be confused with what we now know as television—by which one could “see at a distance” what another person was seeing in their mind. He figured that since vision involves excitations running from the retina up to the brain, perhaps imagination involved signals traveling from the brain back down to the retina. With a device capable of reading those signals off the retina, Tesla explained, “we may finally succeed in not only reading thoughts accurately but reproducing faithfully every mental image.” We could even “project the images conceived on a screen and render them visible to an audience,” he said. He assured the world that he was working on it.

Tesla didn’t subscribe to spiritualism; he didn’t believe in the psychic or the supernatural, though plenty of high-minded scientists of his time did, including the likes of Lodge and Crooke. Tesla described his own view of the universe as “grossly materialistic.” And yet he could wish for his pigeon and she would come; he could understand her through the lights from her eyes.

If such things seem contradictory, it’s because that moment has come and gone, a time when the line between the material and the mental was hard to make out, when matter and mind both had their places upon the same electromagnetic spectrum, a spectrum with infrared and radio at one end, visible light somewhere in the middle, along with fear and love, hope and X-rays, and gamma rays in the far reaches, along with imagination and ideas.

It was a period in the history of science when previously unimaginable ideas were coming not just into focus, but fruition. At the dawn of the 1840s, there was no telegraph, no phonograph, no radio, no phone. By 1901, disembodied voices could be summoned from the ether; messages could be sent across the ocean, surfing electromagnetic waves. It was enough to leave the public dizzy and scientists speculating. “When there’s a new scientific discovery that throws in the air our old scientific concepts, then a lot of extraordinary theories can be entertained,” says Enns of this period of electromagnetic magical thinking. The line between science and pseudoscience becomes difficult to draw.

The current, Enns says, can also flow both ways: “Unorthodox ideas can end up directing what we do in our legitimate scientific practices.” In 1924, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger set out to prove the existence of telepathy by measuring brain waves emanating from the skull. “His idea was that if you could record these electrical impulses, it would show that the brain was a communication device,” Enns says. So Berger invented the electroencephalogram (EEG), a foundational technology of modern-day neuroimaging. We no longer think of our brains as wireless telegraphs or thoughts as things that can be transmitted by brain waves; now we think of brains as computers and thoughts as things that can be uploaded to the cloud. “These ideas have not really gone away,” Enns says.

For Tesla, nerves in the brain had to work by the principle of resonance, which meant thoughts were things we could all tune into, given the right device. If he could create a technology that would allow everyone around the globe to resonate with one another, it “would be of inestimable consequence on all human relations.” Especially his own.

So that was his plan. He was, as he put it, going to “convert the entire Earth into a huge brain.”

At the turn of the century, and the height of his fame, Tesla announced his plans to create a “World System” that would unite in literal harmony the entire globe, allowing people everywhere to send energy and information to be received by anyone, anywhere else.

Other scientists were also experimenting with wireless radio communications, sending electromagnetic waves between grounded transmitters and receivers. The assumption was that the signals were traveling through the air, while the ground currents merely completed the circuit. But Tesla was convinced they had it all backward—there was no way, he said, that the signal would make it through the air for long distances. Light waves travel in straight lines, but the Earth is curved—the information would be making a beeline for outer space. No one at the time knew that radio waves would run up against charged particles in the ionosphere and reflect back.

So Tesla figured that the messages had to be going through the ground. The Earth, he thought, must be a resonant cavity that could host standing waves of electrical vibrations—waves that could be plucked like guitar strings. If he could pump in energy at the Earth’s resonant frequency, he could set the electrical activity of the entire planet aquiver, and use it to transmit messages or power between any two points on the globe.

In 1901, on the northern shore of Long Island, at a site called Wardenclyffe, Tesla erected a 187-foot mushroom-capped tower while the locals looked on bemused. From the base of the tower, a circular staircase wound down to a well 120 feet below the surface, from which there extended an array of iron pipes and four stone-lined tunnels, 100 feet apiece, where the electricity would be pumped into the ground.

To the press he promised that a system of such towers—giant Tesla coils, in effect—would connect all existing telegraph exchanges. It would allow government agencies to send secret messages, which no spy could intercept. It would integrate all the phone lines, create a global news media, link up the world’s stock tickers, distribute sermons around the globe. It would synchronize clocks; transmit images, text, and music; it would provide a global navigation system to steer the ships, and energy to power them. It would send messages—person to person—in a flash, to “an inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch.” It would broadcast the thoughts from one’s retinas to whoever else wanted to see them. And, more than anything, it would make Tesla a little less lonely.

Tesla’s OCD had shaped his thinking about thinking, sparked his interest in resonance, and molded the form of his inventions—but it also left him disconnected and alone. He didn’t like to shake hands and often wore white gloves when out in public. He ate by himself at a special table that no one else at the hotel was allowed to use. As his biographer O’Neill noted:

A fresh table cloth was required for every meal. He also required that a stack of two dozen napkins be placed on the left side of the table. As each item of silverware and each dish was brought to him—and he required that they be sterilized by heat before leaving the kitchen—he would pick each one up, interposing a napkin between his hand and the utensil, and use another napkin to clean it. He could then drop both napkins on the floor. Even for a simple meal, he usually ran through the full stock of napkins.

If a fly landed on the table, they had to remove everything and start over. If a woman nearby wore pearls, it put him off his food.

But if the tower worked, he’d be able to connect to other people, to all people; he wouldn’t even have to wear his white gloves. As a child, Tesla played a game with his father where they’d try to guess the other’s thoughts. With the tower, no one would have to guess. It wasn’t so much that they could read each other’s individual minds. It was that they’d all be thinking together, multiple currents moving in and out of step, the invisible cogs and gears of a single brain. “These ties we cannot see, but we can feel them,” he wrote. In the world of the tower, we would cease to be isolated individuals—for a resonance is always a relationship.

By 1902, the tower was completed, but the rest of the site wasn’t, and he was running out of funds. A year later, it became clear that no money was coming, and Tesla had nothing to show for the project, no evidence that the thing would work, and no way to attract new investors. Frustrated, he cranked up the coil, discharged a storm. “The air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity,” the New York Sunreported, “which seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand.”

Today, scientists largely agree that Tesla’s tower, even if completed, would never have worked. “He thought that he could transmit power through the Earth with no losses because the Earth would function like an inelastic medium,” Carlson explains, “but it doesn’t.” It was a beautiful idea. The real world simply didn’t match up with his grand vision.

It was a failure from which Tesla never recovered.

In the years that followed, he became more of a recluse. Once in a while, he’d make some wild pronouncement or another to the press—death rays and flying machines, a plan to send power to the moon—more inventions he’d dreamed up but for which he had nothing to show. The public grew impatient. Science moved on without him. “He was a broken man,” Carlson says.

In December of 1916, Tesla was to receive the prestigious Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers “for meritorious achievements in his early original work in polyphase and high-frequency electric currents”—emphasis on the “early.” The ceremony was held just steps from Bryant Park. But when Tesla was meant to take the stage, he was nowhere to be found. The engineers looked everywhere—the hallways, the restrooms—before rushing outside. In the plaza of the public library just adjacent, as O’Neill described it, “in the center of a large thin circle of observers stood the imposing figure of Tesla, wearing a crown of two pigeons on his head, his shoulders and arms festooned with a dozen more, their white or pale-blue bodies making strong contrast with his black suit and black hair, even in the dusk. On either of his outstretched hands was another bird, while seemingly hundreds more made a living carpet on the ground in front of him.”

Eventually, Tesla went back inside and accepted his medal. The tower at Wardenclyffe was dynamited and sold for scraps.

Before there were towers—before there was radio, before there were telegraphs—there were pigeons. Homing pigeons, prized for their exceptional navigation, had been used to transmit messages since the days of Julius Caesar. A well-trained bird could fly 600 miles without stopping, averaging 60 miles an hour at a pace. In wartime, they served in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the National Guard; even the U.S. Forest Service and CIA employed pigeons. When Paris was under siege by the Prussians, homing pigeons carried critical notes in and out of the city; using microphotography, the French could fit thousands of messages in the legband of a single bird. In the United States, pigeons flew news stories and stock prices. Papers like the New York Sun and the Boston Daily Mail relied heavily on pigeon post; the Baltimore Sun flew 500 birds between New York City and Washington, D.C.

But when Guglielmo Marconi, using a system of Tesla’s resonant circuits, transmitted the first wireless radio signal across the Atlantic in 1901, the pigeons were suddenly in trouble. “Marconi Beats Pigeons,” read the headline of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle: 200 homing pigeons employed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard to communicate with warships were about to be out of work. “It is thought that the Marconi system can be maintained as cheaply as the pigeon system,” the article reported.

So the unemployed ended up astray in the streets. And Tesla, whose inventions had put them out of a job, took them in.

“Sometimes I feel that by not marrying I made too great a sacrifice to my work,” 70-year-old Tesla told a reporter, “so I have decided to lavish all the affection of a man no longer young on the feathery tribe. I am satisfied if anything I do will live for posterity. But to care for those homeless, hungry, or sick birds is the delight of my life.”

And the white pigeon in particular seemed to stir something in him.

“If she needed me,” Tesla said, “nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.”

“One night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk,” Tesla told O’Neill. “I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light. Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory. When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. … I knew my life’s work was finished.”

On Jan. 7, 1943, at 10:45 pm, Nikola Tesla was found dead in his room by a hotel maid. “For forty years,” read the obituary that ran in The New York Times, “he lived and worked in a world of fantasy crackling with electric sparks, packed with strange towers to receive and emit energy and dreamy contrivances to give utopian man complete control of nature. It was a lonely life.” A spokesman for the hotel said that “Dr. Tesla died as he had spent the last years of his life—alone.”

Only he wasn’t alone—not likely. He always kept the window open.

Today, wireless technology performing nearly every dream Tesla had is in our back pockets, connecting us through that unseen spectrum, in devices, indeed, not that much bigger than a watch. But the homing pigeon remains an enigma.

How does it navigate? Does it use its powerful sense of smell? Its acute vision? Can it hear in infrasound? The U.S. Navy, in the 1950s, funded research to see if it homed by ESP. Scientists mostly agree that the birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic fields—but how? Researchers thought they found magneto-sensors in their beaks, only they turned out to be white blood cells. Now they think they’re in the brain stem, or maybe the inner ear.

A few years ago, some biologists in Spain decided to test whether exposing them to powerful magnetic fields would throw off their compass. They put the pigeons in an MRI—a magnetic resonance imaging machine—with a strength of three Teslas.

Upon release, the birds struggled to find their way. The controls, on the other hand, headed home—mysteriously tuned into some invisible vibrations.

Georgia Street is an east–west street in the cities of Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Its section in Downtown Vancouver, designated West Georgia Street, serves as one of the primary streets for the financial and central business districts, and is the major transportation corridor connecting downtown Vancouver with the North Shore (and eventually Whistler) by way of the Lions Gate Bridge. The remainder of the street, known as East Georgia Street between Main Street and Boundary Road and simply Georgia Street within Burnaby, is more residential in character, and is discontinuous at several points.

West of Seymour Street, the thoroughfare is part of Highway 99. The entire section west of Main Street was previously designated part of Highway 1A, and markers for the ‘1A’ designation can still be seen at certain points.

Starting from its western terminus at Chilco Street by the edge of Stanley Park, Georgia Street runs southeast, separating the West End from the Coal Harbour neighbourhood. It then runs through the Financial District; landmarks and major skyscrapers along the way include Living Shangri-La (the city’s tallest building), Trump International Hotel and Tower, Royal Centre, 666 Burrard tower, Hotel Vancouver and upscale shops, the HSBC Canada Building, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Georgia Hotel, Four Seasons Hotel, Pacific Centre, the Granville Entertainment District, Scotia Tower, and the Canada Post headquarters. The eastern portion of West Georgia features the Theatre District (including Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts), Library Square (the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library), Rogers Arena, and BC Place. West Georgia’s centre lane between Pender Street and Stanley Park is used as a counterflow lane.

East of Cambie Street, Georgia Street becomes a one-way street for eastbound traffic, and connects to the Georgia Viaduct for eastbound travellers only; westbound traffic is handled by Dunsmuir Street and the Dunsmuir Viaduct, located one block to the north.

East Georgia Street begins at the intersection with Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown, then runs eastwards through Strathcona, Grandview–Woodland and Hastings–Sunrise to Boundary Road. East of the municipal boundary, Georgia Street continues eastwards through Burnaby until its terminus at Grove Avenue in the Lochdale neighbourhood. This portion of Georgia Street is interrupted at several locations, such as Templeton Secondary School, Highway 1 and Kensington Park.

Georgia Street was named in 1886 after the Strait of Georgia, and ran between Chilco and Beatty Streets. After the first Georgia Viaduct opened in 1915, the street’s eastern end was connected to Harris Street, and Harris Street was subsequently renamed East Georgia Street.

The second Georgia Viaduct, opened in 1972, connects to Prior Street at its eastern end instead. As a result, East Georgia Street has been disconnected from West Georgia ever since.

On June 15, 2011 Georgia Street became the focal point of the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot.