design history ideas pragmatic historian time

A Thought Experiment on Flag Day

Today is Flag Day in the United States. I thought it was Father’s Day, but that’s next weekend. My days are all messed up with working from home because they just run into one another. I can see why holidays are so important for marking time. I don’t typically pay much attention to Flag Day, but as circumstance would have it, I was thinking about the U.S. flag a couple of days ago. Here was…

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C-19 Window Symbols for COVID-19 Victims

I have seen the sentiment expressed multiple times online that the weeks we have lived in 2020 feel like years as the serious events of the year, including the pandemic, innumerable political events, and the death of George Floyd with the resulting worldwide protests, pile up on us. We barely have time to process major news related to any particular event when another hits and it’s all we can do to hang on for the…

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Mourning Victims of the Pandemic – A Call to Action for Museums

      Since reading this Twitter thread by Kristin Rawls, it has been circling through my head. Within 8 tweets, Rawls has expressed the sad state of the United States of America during the COVID-19 pandemic, how we are collectively willing to reopen society and let tens of thousands more people die unnecessarily because we have been unwilling to mourn the loss of the tens of thousands who have already died. The thread points…

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Ah! That’s Where MK Ultra Comes From!

I’ve been listening to Muse‘s album “The Resistance” (along with several of the group’s other albums), which seems incredibly relevant to today though it was released in 2009. Artists have their fingers on the pulse of society’s trends and movements such that they appear to be prescient. It’s worth a listen to in its entirety (of course I would say that!), but I want to point out a specific song on the album. Track number…

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When Business Learned from Nonprofits

My good friend and museum colleague David Grabitske is back again with another erudite blog post. This one stems from the oft-recommended notion that nonprofits should operate more like businesses. We have discussed the topic many times and I have been contrary about it for years. In fact, I wrote about it back in 2011 on my blog, The Woo Woo Teacup Journal. David, however, has set about finding proof that businesses have learned something…

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