Issue January - February 2018 (2024)

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Smithsonian Magazine takes you on a journey through history, science, world culture and technology with breathtaking images from around the world.

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In this IssueDiscussion@LillianQuinata ON TWITTERFROM THE EDITORS Readers cheered the winners of our sixth annual American Ingenuity Awards, featured in the December issue. The musician-actor-producer John Legend “is indeed one of the greats,” Libby Simms Rudolph agreed. “I look forward to his future creations, both music and films.” Our recognition of the neurosurgeon Gary Steinberg was personal to Kit Carson: “I can think of no one more deserving of a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award. I am incredibly proud to be a patient of his!” One commentator, though, sounded a note of caution: “I really hate the word ‘miracle’ so hopefully this research by Dr. Steinberg opens dialogue on how we as a nation deal with brain injuries and strokes in a reasonable, science-based manner.”Muppet ManiaTV is such a great avenue to reach…3 min

In this IssueContributorsTed Conover“Trying to make memories that are 50 years old vivid” was the trickiest part of reporting on the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike (p. 74), Conover says. But amid the current crisis of police shootings, he thought of the workers’ slogan, “I am a man,” and its resonance today: “It’s the same issue, a certain class of Americans being treated worse than everyone else. In some ways the slogan seems antique; in others, it seems absolutely relevant.” Director of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Conover has written several books, including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.Bharat SikkaWhile photographing the Beatles’ ashram (p. 42), Sikka listened to The White Album: “It was about evoking some kind ofemotion of the band’s presence there, though it was many…3 min

In this IssueGirl PowerWHEN LÉNA ROY was 7 years old, her teacher read the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time aloud to her second-grade class. After school, Léna ran to her grandmother’s house, which was around the corner from her school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to finish the book on her own. She curled up in bed and devoured it. She felt just like the hotheaded, stubborn heroine Meg Murry, and took comfort in the fact that a flawed adolescent girl could save the world. “It was almost like your permission to be a real person,” Roy says. “You don’t have to be perfect.”Millions of other adolescent girls (and boys) have made the same liberating discovery while reading A Wrinkle in Time. What’s different about Roy is that her…5 min

In this IssueRebels With a CauseJO MARCHLittle Women (1868)Tomboyish Jo refuses to let household duties get in the way of what she loves most—writing.ANNE SHIRLEYAnne of Green Gables (1908)The red-haired orphan’s bold personality stuns villagers and brightens the lives of her adoptive parents.NANCY DREWNancy Drew books (1930)Smartly dressed amateur sleuth inspires countless readers, e.g., Hillary Rodham.LAURA INGALLSLittle House on the Prairie (1932)Impetuous Laura embodies frontier spirit, standing up to hardship (and a bear) to become a teacher.RAMONA QUIMBYRamona series (1955)Her sister Beatrice calls her a pest, but bright-eyed Ramona is mostly curious (and worried) about growing up.SCOUT FINCHTo Kill a Mockingbird (1960)Growing up in Alabama, spunky Scout puts herself in others’ shoes to grasp a painful truth.MEG MURRYA Wrinkle in Time (1962)A stubborn 14-year-old with a love of math, Meg journeys to another planet to…2 min

In this IssueMUSES OF MODERN ARTWHAT DOES IT MEAN to redefine art history? For Mickalene Thomas, a luminary of the contemporary art world who specializes in dazzling collage portraits, it means “reclaiming canonized images of beauty and reinterpreting them.” Her take on Édouard Manet’s celebrated 1863 canvas Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), in which two formally dressed men lounge in a wooded scene with a nude woman, is the bold image above, which she titles Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires (The Three Black Women). This 10- by 24-foot collage, part of a new group exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, depicts the subjects in a mosaic of vibrant colors, fragmented shapes, rhinestones and glittered Afros. “These women are so grounded and perfectly comfortable in their own space,” says…2 min

In this IssueBooks of RevelationLAST SUMMER, Giulia Rossetto, a specialist in ancient texts at the University of Vienna, was on a train home to Pordenone, in northern Italy, when she switched on her laptop and opened a series of photographs of a manuscript known as “Arabic New Finds 66.”It is no ordinary manuscript. In antiquity, it was common practice when parchment supplies were limited to scrape the ink from old manuscripts, with chemicals or pumice stones, and reuse them. The resulting double-text is called a palimpsest, and the manuscript Rossetto was studying contained several pages whose Christian text, a collection of saints’ lives written in tenth-century Arabic, hid a much older text beneath, in faintest Greek. Nothing was known about what this “undertext” contained. Rossetto, a PhD student, was given the images as an…13 min

Issue January - February 2018 (2024)

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