“Sculpture is a parable in three dimensions”*…
… and now, as Kate Mothes reports, we can appreciate that remotely…
In the age of the internet, we’re fortunate to have virtual access to museum collections around the world, thanks to objects in the public domain and programs like The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access Initiative. Through a searchable digital catalogue, visitors to the museum’s website can see hundreds of thousands of objects, many images of which are available for download. And it’s not alone—other institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Gallery of Art, and The Cleveland Museum of Art, among others, make pieces in their collections accessible to all.
The thing is, digital images don’t always give us the full picture, so to speak. Even two-dimensional paintings and drawings have unique textures, structural details, and materials that we can only really appreciate in person. This won’t ever really change—nothing beats the real thing. But one caveat is that even in person, much of the work remains hidden. We can’t see the backs of oil paintings, for example, and edges are often hidden within frames. Thanks to The Met’s continued emphasis on imaging, we can now experience every detail in three-dimensional renderings of nearly 140 significant objects in its holdings…
More at: “The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects,” from @thisiscolossal.com.
See more on the Met’s site.
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As we dig depth, we might send artfully-formed birthday greetings to François Girardon; he was born on this date in 1628. A sculptor of the French Baroque, he best known for his statues and busts of Louis XIV and for his statuary in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. Several of his busts are in the Met’s collection— and on the list, one may hope, for 3-D rendering.
“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”*…
With last Friday’s announcement that nonfarm payrolls in February fell by 92,000 (compared with the earlier estimate of 50,000– the third time in five months that the economy lost jobs), unemployment is back in the news. But, as the redoubtable Nathan Yau illustrates in one of his typically-elegant interactive infographics (drawing on data from the January 2026 Current Population Survey via IPUMS), “unemployment” can have a variety of causes…
About eight million Americans reported being unemployed, based on the Current Population Survey from January 2026. Why they were unemployed varies across groups…
… For those in their younger years, it’s a lot more common to be entering the workforce as a new entrant or coming off a break after working previously as a re-entrant. Once people are in the middle of their work career, getting laid off is the most common reason for unemployment.
I expected that people who quit a previous job would be a more common reason, but the rate never goes over 20%. Maybe this rate is partially dampened by those who have a new job lined up and then quit, so they are never unemployed.
Education, which correlates with age, shows similar rates as you go up in levels. Although the rates for being laid off an a re-entrant are flipped between those with a Master’s degree and those with a doctorate or professional degree. The high rate for laid off for Master’s level workers is interesting. I suspect this is related to the type of occupations for this group…
Explore unemployment in the U.S: “Unemployment reasons, by age and education,” from @flowingdata.com.
* Harry S. Truman
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As we rethink redundancy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that Congress enacted the first piece of legislation in newly-installed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “100 Hundred Days” program. Following the crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, real GDP had fallen 29%, unemployment had risen to 25%, and 7,000 banks (nearly a third of the banking system) had failed. A few days earlier, FDR had decreed a “banking holiday” (closing all U.S. banks) and called a special session of Congress. The first piece of Roosevelt’s program, passed by Congress on this date 93 years ago, addressed that lattermost issue: the Emergency Banking Act (which stabililized the banking system). Over the next two-and-a-half months, they passed 14 other pieces of landmark legislation:
- Cullen–Harrison Act (enacting the end of Prohibition, March 16), modifying the Volstead Act
- Economy Act (reducing federal salaries and pensions in order to reduce the deficit, March 20)
- Civilian Conservation Corps (a work relief program, March 31)
- Federal Emergency Relief Act (a job creation program [that became the Works Progress Administration] May 12)
- Agricultural Adjustment Act (relief for farmers, May 12)
- Emergency Farm Mortgage Act (oversight of llending to farmers, May 12)
- Tennessee Valley Authority (rural electrification [and job creation], May 18)
- Securities Act (securities trading regulation to prevent the sorts of excesses [and malfeasance] that triggered the Crash of 1929, May 27)
- abrogation of gold clauses in public and private contracts (elimination of the right of creditors tp demand payment in gold or gold equivalent, June 5)
- Homeowners Refinancing Act (home mortgage assistance, June 13)
- Glass-Steagall Act (banking reforms and the establishment of the FDIC, June 15)
- Farm Credit Act (loans for farmers, June 15)
- Emergency Railroad Transportation Act (protecting interstate commerce, June 15)
- National Industrial Recovery Act (authorizing the president to regulate industry for fair wages and prices to stimulate economic recovery, June 16)
And with these action, the tide began to turn. That said, here is no consensus among economists regarding the motive force for the U.S. economic recovery that continued through most of the Roosevelt years. The common view among most economists is that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies either caused or accelerated the recovery, although his policies were never aggressive enough to bring the economy completely out of recession. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes, while he approved of Roosevelt’s actions, didn’t think that the New Deal went far enough: “It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case—except in war conditions.”
“Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people”*…
It’s Sunday, and war is raging (again) in the Middle East. This time around, the strains of fundamentalist Christian thought are hard to miss in the justifications of the role of the U.S. in the conflict. The widely-circulated reports of troops being briefed that the war in Iran is meant to hasten the Biblical End Times may or may not be true. But it seems clear that the millennial contingent in Trump’s movement is all in on an apocalypse. (And here.) As the right-wing site Media Matters reports, “Christian media figures have claimed that the Iran war could signal ‘the second coming’ or the ‘End Times’ and said ‘we are watching incredible prophecy in this time come to pass’.”
Tal Lavin has reached back to the work he did for his book Wild Faith to help us understand…
As chaos and violence break out across the Middle East in a war led by the US with Israel as junior partner, I wanted to revisit my research on Christian apocalyptic prophecy… about the evangelical Christians eagerly looking forward to the end of the world—and influencing foreign policy to bring it closer. It’s difficult to conceive of willful courting of disaster for religious reasons, but decades of modern Christian prophecy eagerly foresee mass bloodshed in the Middle East as a prelude to Christ’s triumphant return. Evangelicals of this stripe form a crucial part of Trump’s base and governing coalition…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Yearning for the Apocalypse,” from @swordsjew.bsky.social.
And lest we think that this inveighling is in any way unprecedented, Matthew Avery Sutton, reminds us that there’s a long history of politics using religion (and vice versa). In an excerpt from his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, he tells the story of Reconstuction, during which churches were mobilized on both sides of the divide-that-never-went-away…
… In the aftermath of the Civil War, federal leaders sought help from Christian groups… as they sought to reassert their power across the entire United States. The US Army had won on the battlefields, and now governing authorities and their protestant collaborators sought to secure the peace. They aimed to reconstruct the nation, to rebuild Americans’ shattered sense of their nation’s exceptional history and manifest destiny, and to reinvigorate their commitment to the United States’ Christian mission. But to succeed, policymakers knew they needed to limit dissent—including religious dissent.
Christian activists played key roles in every part of postwar reconstruction. In the South, Black ministers and White missionaries welcomed the formerly enslaved into the faith and worked with them to establish independent social and political lives. Defeated Southern Whites launched a multi-generation effort to defend their treason by reimagining the causes of the Civil War and God’s role in it. In the West, a series of Indian wars led to the US government’s creation of a comprehensive reservation system, where government-sponsored missionaries sought to Christianize tribes and “civilize” their children. In Utah Territory the US government cracked down on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its impressive theocracy, seeking to quell religious dissent.
Across the nation, Reconstruction policies provided new opportunities for church leaders in collaboration with the government to impose their ideas and values on the land and its peoples. Protestant activists believed that they alone had the tools and expertise to integrate Black and Native peoples, former Confederates, and religious dissenters into the body politic, while bringing healing and reconciliation to all Americans on their terms. Rocked by the split over slavery and then the war, they worked to build unity by identifying common threats and enemies and organizing Christians against them. Their actions demonstrated that after the conflict, just as before, the free exercise clause did not apply to all equally. But minority groups constantly challenged the power of mainstream Christian leaders…
… Only about one-third of enslaved Americans considered themselves Christian at the start of the Civil War. But in the Reconstruction era Black church going skyrocketed. And just about all of those who converted chose to attend Black-led churches. The days of Southern Black Christians submitting to second-class treatment in the house of the Lord had ended. In urban areas, African Americans could usually join churches that Black activists had founded before the war. In rural areas, they had fewer options. They sometimes had to settle for makeshift meetings in vacant buildings or arrange outdoor services until they could build rudimentary houses of worship.
Black clergy became some of the strongest advocates for full equality and rights in the postwar South. Seeing Jesus as a liberator, they aimed to make the egalitarianism of the gospel and the Declaration’s line that “all men are created equal” the reality in the United States. Many engaged directly in politics, understanding that while slavery might have ended, securing political equality required vigilance…
… Black ministers’ political engagement made them targets of violence. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, a [Protestant-led] terrorist organization founded by Southern Whites shortly after the war, burned down churches and threatened Black activists. A journalist testified to the US Senate about his interview with a minister. While “he had been preaching on the circuit,” Klansmen dragged the preacher from bed in the middle of the night and “beat him severely.” They “told him that if he returned to the county he would suffer for it.” This was one example of many. As racial violence escalated in the South, serving as a minister proved dangerous…
… Historian, sociologist, and Black activist W.E.B. Du Bois summarized in 1903 the role that churches played in Black life, especially in the postwar South. “The Negro church of today is the social centre of Negro life in the United States,” he wrote, “and the most characteristic expression of African character.” Postwar Black churches, as Du Bois understood, represented the heart of Black efforts to secure social, political, and religious equality. Church leaders had engineered the Christian faith into a tool of liberation, which made them a threat to the White Christians of the South and much of the rest of the United States.
In addition to working to suppress Black political and religious power, many Southern Whites launched a quasi-religious campaign to reshape the memory of the Civil War. Rather than acknowledge their deep investment in slavery, they recast the conflict as a tragic clash between two honorable forces—the North fighting to preserve the Union, and the South struggling to defend local autonomy and states’ rights. The authors of this revisionist account reduced slavery to a secondary issue, incidental to the “real” causes of the war. As a result, by war’s end, many White Southerners felt they had no reason to repent, no moral reckoning to face, and no obligation to embrace Black equality or suffrage. For them, the war had simply preserved the Union and, almost as an afterthought, ended slavery. Nothing more.
Christianity became central to this new Southern narrative. In defeat, White Southerners cast themselves in the role of Christ, imagining their suffering as redemptive. They claimed they had sacrificed for the greater good of the nation, their values—chivalric protection of White women, paternalistic care for those they enslaved, and Christian devotion—positioned them as the rightful moral leaders of the country. In their view, God had chosen them to guide the nation toward righteousness, but first he had humbled and purified them through the bloodshed of war…
Also eminently worth reading in full: How Christianity Was Used By the Powerful and the Marginalized to Shape Post-Civil War America,” from @literaryhub.bsky.social.
We are reminded why our founding fathers– so many of them, Deists— so wisely insisted on freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Apposite: “The ‘Straight White American Jesus’ podcast covers the history, philosophy, theology, and politics of Christian nationalism” (from Boing Boing)
Also, (under the general heading “things aren’t always what they seem”): “The Iran War’s Most Precious Commodity Isn’t Oil,” (gift article from Bloomberg)
And finally: only vaguely related, but fascinating: “Preached Whales“– (landlocked) Central European pulpits shaped like fish, whales, and boats.
* classic children’s fingerplay rhyme
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As we celebrate separation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan was released.
Johnny’s in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine / I’m on the pavement, thinkin’ about the government…
The opening sequence of D. A. Pennebaker‘s Dont Look Back (the apostrophe is absent in the title… and yes, that’s Allen Ginsberg in the background)
“Every act of energy conservation… is more than just common sense: I tell you it is an act of patriotism”*…
But how do we best honor that admonition? The estimable Saul Griffith has observed “We need a proportional quantitative understanding of energy use, for everyone.” Now, Hannah Ritchie (Deputy Editor of Our World in Data and Senior Researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford) rides to the rescue with an elegant tool that compares and quantifies (in both watt-hours and usage cost, in both the U.S, and the U.K.) the energy consumption of different products and activities.
Try it: “Does that use a lot of energy?” from @hannahritchie.bsky.social. Background in her newsletter.
* Jimmy Carter
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As we watch our wattage, we might send wild birthday greetings to Bernard Frank; he was born on this date in 1902. A conservationist, forester, and wilderness activist, he had a long, engaged career in conservation concerns, especially in the D.C. area, where he was a leader in organizing the Rock Creek Watershed Association which worked to restore and preserve the area around Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., and Maryland and in the effort that lead to the creation of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. He was honored for his work in this region with the naming of Lake Bernard Frank in Derwood, Maryland. But Frank is probably best remembered as one of the eight founding members of The Wilderness Society.
“Bacteria represent the world’s greatest success story”*…
But as Stephen Jay Gould goes on to observe (in his 1996 book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin), “They are today and have always been the modal organisms on earth; they cannot be nuked to oblivion and will outlive us all. This time is their time, not the ‘age of mammals’ as our textbooks chauvinistically proclaim. But their price for such success is permanent relegation to a microworld, and they cannot know the joy and pain of consciousness. We live in a universe of trade-offs; complexity and persistence do not work well as partners.”
Still, we (more complex) humans have recognized– and accommodated– bacteria for millennia. As We Make Money Not Art explains in a review of a recent book– We The Bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture by architectural historians Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley— that’s fascinatingly apparent in the history of architecture…
This “alternative history of architecture from the point of view of microbes” compiles the research that led to the exhibition We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture at the 24th Milan Triennale last year. Curated by Colomina and Wigley, the show investigated how microbial ecosystems relate to spatial design and health inequality.
The book argues that microbes have not only built the whole planetary biosphere but they have also been the real architects of our homes and cities throughout the ages. Or rather, it’s the fear and diseases they cause that have shaped our spaces and the ways we move through them.
About ten thousand years ago, humans began retreating into spaces increasingly cut off from the exterior world. Plants, soil and insects could be left outside. But microbes, including pathogenic ones, followed humans inside their homes, where they adapted, mutated and generated new diseases. As our shelters expanded into villages, cities and sprawling empires, so too did the microbial ecosystems.
The authors narrate how buildings and bodies exist in a constant microbial exchange, co-evolving into a single, dynamic ecosystem. The microbiome of a home is highly specific to its inhabitants. Even the microbiome of a frequently cleaned hospital room resembles the microbiome of the previous patient, but starts to resemble that of a new occupant after twenty-four hours.
Architecture cannot exist without microbes, and, by extension, without disease. While scrubbing, spraying and disinfecting may eliminate most microorganisms, these practices also breed extremophiles, species so resistant that they can take over the space.
Throughout history, the book reveals, health crises have dictated architectural and urban design. From toilets to fumigation systems, from the plague hospitals, aka lazarettos, to the sanatoriums for tuberculosis patients; from sewage systems to urban parks, cities have been continually reshaped in response to the threats they sought to contain. Architecture became the first line of defence against microbes…
[More of the intertwined history of bacteria and our reponse to them, with lots of fascinating photos…]
… Given the important role that microbes play for our immune systems and the environments we inhabit, the authors call for a biotic architecture. Biotic architecture is less human-centric than traditional architecture. It learns from microbes rather than resists them. It does, of course, maintain some antimicrobial protocols against pathogens remain crucial. Water, sewage systems, toilets and food preparation areas still need to be cleansed, but cleaning routines should also embrace controlled exposure to microbial diversity. During COVID-19, for example, microbiologist Elisabetta Caselli and her colleagues replaced conventional disinfectants with probiotic-based sanitation in six Italian public hospitals. The result was a decrease in surface pathogens by up to 90% compared to conventional chemical cleaning and lower rates of healthcare-associated infections and antibiotic resistances… For once, here is a book that presents a vision where humans can actively contribute to microbial diversity, collaborate with the unseen world around us and build in ways that nurture rather than harm the environment…
More– and more fascinating images– at: “We The Bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture.”
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As we coexist, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Rebekah Speight of Dakota City, Nebraska sold a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget that resembled President George Washington for $8,100 on eBay (the third most expensive McNugget ever sold). She had kept the McNugget in her freezer for 3 years before deciding to sell it…. because bacteria.
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