The Art Institute of Chicago has three copies of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic work The Great Wave Off Kanagawa in its collection and one of them has been removed from storage and is back on display in the museum until Jan 6, 2025.
The Great Wave has not been on view in the Art Institute galleries for five years because, like all prints, it is susceptible to light damage and must rest a minimum of five years between showings to preserve its colors and vibrance.
Here’s a video of the print being removed from storage as well as a brief comparison of their three prints:
For other places you can see The Great Wave on display, check out Great Wave Today.
Tags: art · Art Institute of Chicago · Katsushika Hokusai · museums · video
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The Open Book in Wigtown, Scotland is a rental place (
available on Airbnb) where you can stay and help run the bookstore downstairs. “There’s no better feeling than somebody buying a book that you put on display.”
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“Harris and Walz, intentionally or not, are projecting something different: a sitcom vibe. And not just any sitcom — the multi-camera family shows of the 1980s.” Blended families, cool woman/dorky guy, and woman in charge were all 80s sitcom staples.
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For his 2012-13 piece The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form, artist R. Eric McMaster built a hockey rink less than 1/10th the size of a regulation rink and had two full hockey teams play what has to be the most frustrating game of hockey ever. This is definitely a metaphor for something but I don’t quite know what.
Tags: art · hockey · R. Eric McMaster · sports · this is a metaphor for something · video
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“Dark energy, which most physicists have long held to be unchanging, may in fact be weakening.” And now cosmologists are trying to figure out what this means for our conceptions of the universe.
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Elite athletes are using a new baking soda formulation to boost athletic performance. A recent study showed “a 1.4% boost for cyclists in a 40-km time trial, which works out to a gain of roughly a minute over the course of an event lasting an hour”.
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Australian artist Joshua Smith makes extremely detailed and realistic miniatures of grimy, graffitied buildings — he calls them “sculptures of Urban Decay”.
See also Gritty Miniatures of Classic NYC Street Objects.
Tags: art · Joshua Smith
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An introduction to the latest iteration of Dynamicland’s Realtalk, a prototype of
a communal computing environment that makes use of physical materials to make collaboration easier & more powerful. (Hard to explain, just watch the video..)
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Cars Have Fucked Up This Country Bad. “On average, America is an ugly country. The median American scene…would be an exhaust-choked roadway flanked on both sides by fast food restaurants and big box stores.”
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A working thumper from Dune built out of Lego. (Working as in it thumps…I have no idea if it actually summons Shai-Hulud.)
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A copy of the letter written and signed by Albert Einstein in 1939 warning President Franklin Roosevelt of the possibility of Nazi Germany building nuclear weapons is up for auction next week at Christie’s. The estimate is $4-6 million.
The present letter is based direc...
This is a website you can only visit once. (I mean, technically you can visit many times. But embracing constraints is worthwhile.)
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Hi, it’s me, Edith, again! I’m back with one more comic before I sign off for a while. I know I haven’t actually been blogging recently, but I wanted to make a more official “goodbye for now” post in case anyone is like, Where did Edith go? Basically I think I bit off a little more than I could chew, blogging-wise. But it meant so much to me that Jason was willing to give it a shot.
Thank you for reading, big thanks to Jason for having me, and I hope to be back before too long (especially if Jason goes on vacation again or something 👀). And of course I’m not actually going anywhere, so I’ll see you in the comments!
Tags: diary comics
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Lies by scientists can kill people — falsified research on beta blockers may have killed 800,000 people. “In cases where research dishonesty is literally killing people, shouldn’t it be appropriate to resort to the criminal justice system?”
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I Never Expected To Run For Office — Here’s What I Learned. “An election wasn’t really a contest with a prize. It was a course of study. It was the process of trying to become the world’s premier authority in what my neighbors wanted and needed…”
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I don’t remember how I happened upon them, but I’ve been enjoying Lane 8’s seasonal mixtapes for the past few years — good upbeat music to work to.
He’s been doing these for 11 years. The Denver DJs mixes are available on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. The fall 2024 mix should be out very soon!
Tags: Lane 8 · music
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100 tiny tricks for sorting out your life. I did this one recently: “Take 10 minutes to tackle the inevitable plastic boxes and lids situation in your kitchen.” (All this advice all at once was kinda overwhelming tbh.)
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I’d never heard this before: in a long jump competition in 1974, Tuariki Delamere did a full front flip during a jump in an attempt to fly further.
The idea of a front flip in long jump had been talked about for years. Experts believed it could help jumpers go further by ...
The folks at Kurzgesagt have done a few time travel videos now, but this one is notable for its concise, intuitive explanation and visualization of our constant speed through spacetime (special relativity).
Everything in our universe moves at the speed of light through f...
Realized I often use “Forgetful Jones” when describing my tendency to forget things but had forgotten where I’d picked it up from. It’s from Sesame Street, of course.
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A new scientific analysis suggests that the Altar Stone at Stonehenge (weighing several tons) was transported to the site from more than 450 miles away in Scotland (likely by sea).
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If you (or someone you know) has hiked the Appalachian Trail since 1979, it’s likely that a photo of that person exists in the ATC’s online Hiker Photo Archive. Some folks in these photos have never seen them before & forgot they even exist.
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In her excellent link-laden newsletter Curious About Everything, my friend Jodi Ettenberg highlighted this passage from Steve Silberman, the author of Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity who died last week (italics mine):
Sometimes the word “...
“Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who…would start his job at the White House ‘being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.’”
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The last coal-fired power station in the UK will close down on Sept 30. Coal literally fueled the Industrial Revolution in the UK and now it’s all but vanished from the country.
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David Attenborough on Cybertruck behavior. “Here we see the Cybertruck has formed a peculiar symbiotic relationship with the larger Flatbed Trailer species.”
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