Posts in The New Yorker
In Search of Sleep, with Bob Ross

It seems only fair that, since our phones keep us awake at night as we scroll helplessly through our feeds, and then wake us up in the morning with an alarm, they should also help us fall asleep once in a while. Recently, the sleeping and meditation app Calm added the famously soothing voice of Bob Ross, the painting instructor with big hair, who hosted the television program “The Joy of Painting,” which ran on PBS from 1983 to 1994.

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The New Ten's Two-Body Problem

Five years from now, on the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S., an American woman of distinction will appear on the ten-dollar bill, with Alexander Hamilton retained somewhere on the note. This decision, announced last week by Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, has been met with considerable puzzlement from those who wonder why we would demote Hamilton, the founder of our financial system, instead of Andrew Jackson, who was the architect of the Trail of Tears, an opponent of central banking, and the target of the grassroots campaign to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill, led by the group Women on 20s.

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The Prehistory of the Peeps Diorama

In 2014, Matthew McFeeley and his friends Mary Clare Peate and Alex Baker created an intricate historical diorama depicting the 1963 March on Washington. Evoking the color palette of the photographs that document the real event, the diorama was painted in black, white, and shades of gray. Marchers are shown holding tiny, hand-painted signs that read “we demand voting rights now!” and “we march for jobs for all now!” At the center of the action, the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., stands at a podium, poised to give his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.

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