Travel Between The Pages

You should check out Postcard Past: A site collecting contemporary photo recreations of scenes from old postcards, which neatly contrast the stylized presentation of the often-future-seeming architecture depicted in postcards of the past with the reality of today. To quote the project’s curator, “I’m interested in economic, social, and urban history, and what we learn about them when we compare these highly edited, aspirational bits of old ephemera and the built environment of today. Stories about the rise-and-fall of entire industries, institutional discrimination, and the destruction of public transit systems. Racism, as well as resiliency and creativity in the face of that racism. Immigration, real estate booms, and disinvestment. Too many parking lots, so many collapsed banks, tons of financial crime. Civil rights progress. Advances in engineering. Pandemics. Leaps forward in medical care. Privatization of public goods. Secularization. Adaptive reuse.” This is a genuinely interesting bit of social history and a fascinating archive to get lost in.

As an inveterate museum goer, I am in a continual state of denial about the origins of most museum collections. There’s No Such Thing as an Ethical Museum. “At its core, an art museum is essentially a narrative of empire. If, as Napoleon quipped, history is a set of lies agreed upon, a museum is their physical manifestation.”

Since the onset of the Pandemic, I’ve found myself reading more Science Fiction. This is probably a healthy way to deal with frightening reality of our times. Although as a young reader many decades ago, I was a voracious consumer of Sci-fi novels, short stories, and magazines, so falling back on old habits is not surprising. This is Tor.com’s list of SFF books you should be aware of for the second half of the year.

I count myself among the fortunate travelers who got to visit Venice before it became so overtouristed that it’s become necessary to make an appointment to see the city. However, this series of dream-like images by the extraordinary French photographer Franck Bohbot has me longing to return. See Venice and swoon right here.

I will never forget the night that I realized that I’d never really seen the night sky before. Sitting outside of my little tent on the side of a mountain in Switzerland, I saw a sky so new to me that it seemed like I was on another planet. For most people in the so-called developed world light pollution severely limits views of stars. Because the loss of dark skies is so acute, astronomers have coined a new term for it. ‘Noctalgia’ is a feature of the modern age.