Shepherds with Picnic, by Jacob Wothly and Emile Mangel du Mesnil, c. 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016.

Energy

Volume XV, Number 2 | winter 2024

Miscellany

“If people would think more of fairies, they would soon forget the atom bomb,” Walt Disney quipped in 1948. President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: public fear of the atom bomb was growing, and in 1953 he assured Americans in his “Atoms for Peace” speech that war was not imminent and that nuclear technology had enormous potential for peacetime activity as well. Eisenhower then recruited Disney to produce a television program promoting the “peaceful atom.” In 1957, “Our Friend the Atom” aired on ABC, featuring animated cartoons and narration by Heinz Haber, a scientist who had worked in Nazi Germany and later became a technical consultant for Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park.

If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.

—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884

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The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.
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DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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