Smithsonian articles from November 2003

Smithsonian archives from November 2003

Magic moments: a new book and a Paris arts center pay homage to photography's elusive 95-year-old grand master.(Indelible Images)(Henri Cartier-Bresson)
November 1, 2003... "I have no interest in photography," insists Henri Cartier-Bresson, 95, one of the founders of modern photojournalism. But this year would seem to prove him wrong: the Bibliotheque Nationale de France gave him a huge retrospective, the...

Leaping lizards.(Just Looking)(Mike Guevara)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... LEAPING LIZARDS! "The higher you jump, the better you can catch the ball," says Mike Guevara, explaining why his Oxnard (California) High School football coaches wanted to test his levitation capacities. Guevara managed a 31.6-inch liftoff....

The pledge's creator: what would the minister who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance make of the legal challenge to it?(Presence Of Mind)
November 1, 2003... I first struggled with "under God" in my fourth-grade class in Westport, Connecticut. It was the spring of 1954, and congress had voted, after some controversy, to insert the phrase into the Pledge of Allegiance, partly as a cold war rejoinder...

Master Glass: from opera halls to neighbor-hood movie theaters, Philip Glass attracts an enormous audience--many of whom have never listened to classical music.
November 1, 2003... We had come to hear the future. It was a sunny afternoon in the spring of 1974, and my band and I, all jazz players, had ventured to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to hear what was being touted by critics and writers as the future...

Saving Atchafalaya: a more than 70-year effort to "control" America's largest river basin swamp is threatening the Cajun culture that thrives on it.
November 1, 2003... "You got him, Alice?" It's a little after midnight deep in the heart of Louisiana's fabled Atchafalaya Basin. Mike Bienvenu is yelling good-naturedly from the back of his 18-foot aluminum skiff. "You missed that last one, so if you want frog,...

Veiled threat: in post-revolutionary Iran, reading fiction became a subversive act.(Book Review)
November 1, 2003... READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN AZAR NAFISI RANDOM HOUSE, $23.95 The Tehran where Azar Nafisi grew up during the 1960s was a dynamic and freewheeling place, thanks to Iran's oil wealth and the secular and pro-Western, although...

Flashbacks: reconsidering JFK and Sylvia Plath.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
November 1, 2003... One day when Dana Calvo was 6, she heard something on TV about "Camelot" and a man called President Kennedy. When she asked about those things, her mother recalled the afternoon the president was shot, 40 years ago this month. Then 22, her...

"The President's been shot": forty years ago, the assassination of JFK stunned Americans, who vividly recall the day even as they grapple with his complex legacy.
November 1, 2003... So it has been 40 years--almost as long as he lived. John F. Kennedy was 46 when he was shot while sitting next to his wife, Jacqueline, in the back seat of a Lincoln Continental convertible on Elm Street in Dallas at noon. The president was...

Hooked on aging: our writer tries to just say no to getting older.(The Last Page)
November 1, 2003... It all started when I was a kid. Like most kids, I just couldn't wait to get older. I thought it was "cool" to "grow up." I can still remember my 10th birthday. Double digits! The big one-oh! My dad gave me a hundred dimes and a new bicycle....

Rare fare.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... Dick waterman is one of those rare individuals who's in the music business for the love of heartfelt, authentic music and the people who make it ("Focus on the Blues"). Without the inspiration and assistance of such people, many musicians would...

Seeya Dia.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... As I read "Beacon of Light," about the Dia:Beacon museum in Beacon, New York, I wondered if the author and I had visited the same place. In Michael Heizer's work she saw a negative sculpture; I saw holes in the floor. In Donald Judd's...

'Winks jinks.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... "A walk across England" asserts that serious adult competition in tiddlywinks was "dreamed up in the mid-1950s by a group of students at Cambridge who wanted to hack into some of the respect given athletes." But heated tiddlywinks bouts...

Fin Din.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... The bottle-nose dolphin's self-awareness and intelligence might indeed qualify the species as unsuitable for military use on ethical grounds ("Uncle Sam's Dolphins"). The Navy claims it doesn't send dolphins on "dangerous" missions. But Navy...

Sneaker beaker.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2003... "Eureka!," about the role of serendipity in inventions, cited only male inventors. But consider chemist Patsy Sherman, who was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2001 and whose story appears in my From Indian Corn to Outer...

Tumult and transition in "little America": Americans created Liberia as a homeland for freed slaves. But a quarter century of civil war over ethnic animosities has renewed questions about the U.S. role in the African nation.
November 1, 2003... On a balmy January day in 2001, Maurice Pelham, a descendant of Mississippi slaves and a Liberian citizen, was looking for familiar faces in a stack of old photographs at the National Museum in Monrovia, the country's capital city. Even then,...

All creatures great and small: two hundred and seventy-four of the world's most exotic mammals go on display at the Museum of Natural History.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
November 1, 2003... The male orangutan emits an aura of power and grace: frozen in mid-swing, its lanky arms are outstretched and its shaggy, rust-colored hair flutters in a steady breeze. Only on closer inspection does the illusion of life fade. The ape's hands...

Uncle Sam wants your museum.(From The Attic)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... On October 13, 1917, seven months after declaring war on Germany, President Woodrow Wilson informed Smithsonian Secretary Charles D. Walcott that the nation required the use of 10,000 square feet of the Institution's seven-year-old beaux-arts...

The mother of all mammals: an artist and scientist collaborated to build the first ever 3-D model of the oldest known mammal, a shrewlike creature called Morgie.(Around The Mall)
November 1, 2003... For Colorado artist Gary Staab, who's renowned for his life-size re-creations of large prehistoric creatures, the Smithsonian's request last March that he sculpt a model of a four-inch shrew-like mammal came as a bit of a surprise. But Staab,...

57.(Who's Counting?)(yo-yos owned by National Museum of American History)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2003... YO-YOS ARE OWNED BY THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, INCLUDING THE MEGAS PINFAKTOR, DONATED IN JUNE BY RICK WYATT (ABOVE), WHO USED IT TO SET THE WORLD RECORD FOR "SLEEPING" (SPINNING A YO-YO AT THE BOTTOM OF ITS STRING): 13 MINUTES AND...

Antique road show: before the Interstates passed the highway by, America got its kicks on Route 66.(The Object At Hand)
November 1, 2003... Back when the Model A Ford was America's ticket to ride, it must have seemed that half the nation was heading west on Route 66. In fact, the late songwriter Bobby Troup penned "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" during his own trip west on that...

Crash Junkie: flight instructor Craig Fuller scales mountains, combs deserts and trudges through wilderness to track down old airplane wrecks.(People File)
November 1, 2003... We've been scratching and crawling our way up a canyon in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains for more than two hours, and we still have no real idea where we're headed. The July temperature is about 100. We're all dirty, and some of us are bleeding...

Ouch! A new finding that fish feel pain has set off a tortured debate about the ethics of angling.(Phenomena & Curiosities)
November 1, 2003... In early october larch trees paint gold on the slopes of the Mission Mountains of western Montana and snow edges down from high rocks in waves, like a curtain blowing closed on summer. Men and women wade into the chilling waters of Rock Creek,...

Celestial sightseeing: from Triton's active geysers to the Sun's seething flares, newly enhanced images from U.S. and foreign space probes depict the solar system as never before.
November 1, 2003... After the observations of the ancients and the meticulous mathematical charting of Johannes Kepler, after Giotto's comet fresco and the telescopic discoveries of Galileo Galilei, after Sputnik, Ranger and all the far-flung probes of more than...

Seeing Sylvia Plath: a new movie rekindles curiosity about the poet's life, love and suicide at age 30.(Movie Review)
November 1, 2003... The party was in full swing. As many as 100 guests, most of them students, crowded the second-floor hall of the Women's Union at England's University of Cambridge the night of February 25, 1956. A jazz band played, some couples swirling to the...

Tribal talk: immersion schools try to revive and preserve Native American languages.(Points Of Interest)
November 1, 2003... Jesse Desrosier begins each school day like lots of kids. The eighth grader hangs up his coat, pulls off his muddy boots and lopes into his classroom, raising a hand in greeting. Then he opens his mouth, and out comes a small miracle. ...

New hall on the mall: a dazzling exhibition space celebrates mammalian diversity through re-creations of habitats on four continents.(From the Secretary)(National Museum of Natural History)
November 1, 2003... The architects who designed the National Museum of Natural History early in the 20th century placed three spacious exhibition wings to the east, west and north of a soaring entry rotunda. But the grandeur of their design was compromised within...

Dream weavers.
November 1, 2003... Choirs of roosters and burros salute each sunrise in the pre-Columbian village of Teotitlan del Valle (pop. 6,000), nearly a mile high in the Sierra Juarez foothills a couple of miles off a rutted section of the Pan-American Highway east of...

This month in history: November anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
November 1, 2003... 50 YEARS AGO: SKYROCKET IN FLIGHT Flying a Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket, test pilot A. Scott Crossfield becomes the first person to zoom past Mach 2--twice the speed of sound--on November 20, 1953. The former Navy fighter pilot takes the...