The title is one of the taglines for Night at the Museum, one of my favorite film franchises. I’m actually partial to the sequel, Battle of the Smithsonian, which is comedy gold. Anyone saying otherwise should be muted, blocked, or otherwise removed from your life immediately. I recently watched Night at the Museum because I planned to visit New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
The museum was fantastic, of course, although the tablet that makes things come alive at night wasn’t on the premises. Traveling exhibition, probably. Or maybe Killmonger was hired by the Egyptian government to steal it back. Whatever the reason was, the museum had to get more creative in making history come to life for visitors without brains on PhDs or PsycHaDelics.
The best exhibits connected history and science to the human experience. The exhibit on Sharks, for example, taught attendees about humans’ impact and relationship with the predators, and, of course, the likelihood that they’d become shark bait (hoo ha ha). Other exhibits were a little more subtle. In the “Primates” wing, one plaque compared chimpanzees’ patriarchal, violent society with the more agreeable one of bonobos:
Chimpanzees and bonobos, the two apes most
closely related to humans, form very different
societies. Chimps establish a ranked
hierarchy of males, with each male fighting
and intimidating others to maintain his position.
In extreme cases one chimp may kill another.Among bonobos (right) females establish the
“Primate Politics”. American Museum of Natural History.
structure of society, and status seems much less
important. Bonobos collaborate and share food,
and when tensions do arise. thev use sex and
play instead of fighting to solve the problem.
Can you guess which ape humans are more closely related to?
History’s impact on society differs from that of science. While the events happened in the past, and scientific phenomena exist in the present, the former’s effects often persist. Consider a re-interpretation of an existing exhibit, the “Old New York Diorama” in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial. The diorama itself dates back to 1939, and is riddled with historical inaccuracies motivated by White Supremacy and ignorance (of course). A reinterpretation preserves and annotates the original diorama, illustrating how the historical account itself can be analyzed critically as a piece of history, sort of a Heisenberg Principle for the liberal arts. The annotations describe the present-day existence of the Native Americans living in the area, and their relationship to mainstream, White America.
Even exhibits that don’t appear to have any present-day effects, like the description of Jewish Refugees in India, or descriptions of Easter Island’s Rapa Nui, still show us that the world was, will be, and can be different. All it takes is a change in perspective: taking world for granted is easy when we forget that people who want and value the same things as us can go about it very differently.
This Week’s Top 3
- Seeing old friends 🗽 – met up with a few from college and high school this weekend in New York. I’m getting to that age where everyone’s personality is pretty much set, and seeing someone after four years would be the same as seeing them after eight. That is, until they have kids of course.
- Coffee from Tom’s Restaurant ☕️ – I swear it’s not just because Seinfeld was filmed here. This coffee was great—and apparently Obama agrees.
- Biking through Central Park 🚴🏾♀️ – if you can bike, I wouldn’t miss this on your next trip to the Big City