All posts tagged: Objects

How to Define America in 30 Objects

How to Define America in 30 Objects

Published by Sam Flores

George Washington, this nation’s first general, its inaugural president, the eponym of its capital city, left one of his most indelible marks on America from afar. Not one for a grand speech, Washington printed his Farewell Address in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, the same day he announced that he would voluntarily relinquish his power, departing the then-seat of government for his homestead at Mount Vernon. No one said the speech aloud in a formal setting for decades, until the Civil War. Sensing that our Constitution was in crisis, a group of citizens from Philadelphia asked both chambers of Congress to recite the Farewell Address in 1862 to commemorate the 130th anniversary of Washington’s birth. In 1896, the Senate began the tradition of reading it every year. The custom, with the speakers alternating between our two political parties, continues to this day. Washington originally wrote the address beside a brass candlestand, which was passed down through his family until 1878, when it was transferred to the United States government and then, a …

Poisonous Objects | Carolina A. Miranda

Poisonous Objects | Carolina A. Miranda

Published by José Betancourt

Perhaps the most unsettling monsters are those that are somewhat human. Zombies. Headless horsemen. The deadly Sirens of Greek myth. In Mapuche Indigenous lore of the southern Andes there’s the imbunche—a human infant who, over time, is transformed into a grotesquerie by malevolent brujos, or sorcerers. Its head is rotated backward, its tongue split in two, and one of its legs is folded behind its back and attached to the nape of its neck. The imbunche moves forward, crawling about on its available limbs, but always looks back. It’s a creature that haunts the imaginations of South American children, and the region’s art and literature. And it emerged whole from the recesses of my childhood nightmares this past fall as I stood before Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone at the Los Angeles exhibition space the Brick. More than eleven feet tall, this uncanny sculpture is as much a work of inventive deformation as it is a feat of creativity. Unmanned Drone began life as a bronze equestrian monument to the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that commanded …

The Secret Life of Old Objects

The Secret Life of Old Objects

Published by Jenni Sidey

Typically, any object that has been around longer than we have can give us a feeling of warmth. For example, scuffed-up wooden chairs, ceramics that have a small crack, and black-and-white photos curling at the edges all possess a hidden richness. They give off a soft vibration of all the stories they have held. Objects that have weathered time are more than just objects. They are companions. They tell us we are part of a longer timeline that extends both before us and will extend after us. Nostalgia plays a part in this, of course. Researchers like Holbrook and Schindler (2003) have shown that the memories tied to familiar things can tug at us in powerful ways. This is why a childhood toy can still stir something in us decades later, or why a record player feels more soulful than a streaming app. Old things act almost like small, solid pieces of the past. They are shortcuts to memory we can touch. Continuity, Identity, and the Comfort of Imperfection In addition to reminiscing, nostalgia also …

We Could Hitch a Ride to Unknown Frontiers on Super-Fast Interstellar Objects Like 3I/ATLAS

We Could Hitch a Ride to Unknown Frontiers on Super-Fast Interstellar Objects Like 3I/ATLAS

Published by José Betancourt

Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on December 19, coming within just 167 million miles. Scientists have been closely monitoring the object — which is largely believed to be a natural comet and only the third of its kind to have been directly observed in the solar system — as it continued on its highly eccentric trajectory. The encounter with Earth, however, turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the object may be an alien spacecraft, lamented in a blog post titled “3I/ATLAS Ignores Earth.” Instead of doing something you might expect of aliens during their closest approach to Earth, it simply cruised on by. While hopes that we were just visited by an alien race diminish even further, Loeb made an interesting pivot in a follow-up piece, proposing that other objects like 3I/ATLAS could be useful for our future attempts to explore beyond our solar system. “The Voyager Golden Records, containing a time capsule of …