Let's write about the very first photograph: A Paris notecard

The First Candid

In 1838, Louis Daguerre snapped a photo of a Parisian street, empty but for a shoeshine boy and his client. Now that some sleuths have zeroed in on the location, the city is marking it with a plaque.

Published in The New Yorker by Lauren Collins.

Before portrait photographer August Sander (1876-1964), and Diane Arbus and Olan Mills, before Facetune and duck face, there were two: a shoeshine boy and his client, captured by Louis Daguerre on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, 1838, in what is thought to be the first photograph to depict human beings. The bootblack squats beside a chest containing the tools of his trade. The patron stands, hands clasped behind his back, with a foot perched on the box. We know it’s spring, because the leaves are coming in on the plane trees. The two were hardly the only people out that day on the bustling stretch of cabarets. But they were the only people who held still long enough to be captured by Daguerre’s curious new machine, which required an exposure time of up to ten minutes. The next year, presenting the daguerreotype to the Assemblée Nationale, the physicist François Arago noted, “In this genre, it’s the unforeseen that one must count upon.” Soon, the French state would buy the rights to the invention and offer it as a free gift “to the world.” The names of the boy and his client were never recorded, but they live on as the accidental embodiment of photography on the brink of conquering the world.

One night in 2024, Maximilien Van Aertryck went out for drinks with his colleagues Axel Danielson and Kalle Boman. Van Aertryck is a producer who works with the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund and has co-directed a documentary about the history of image-making. In other words, he knows a lot about photography. He had always loved the Daguerre picture: “It’s so poetic, with those two lonely people on that huge frame.” As he and his friends drifted out of the café, they crossed the Boulevard du Temple. It was June. The trees were nearing lushness. “We were, like, ‘Wait a minute! It must have been taken somewhere around here!,’ ” Van Aertryck recalled, visiting the area the other day. They punched a few keywords into Google, and found some articles, “in pretty big newspapers,” surmising that the photograph might have been snapped near the Filles du Calvaire Métro stop. “We knew immediately that there was no way it was there,” Van Aertryck said. “If you look at the photo, it just doesn’t make sense. So we went home and went to bed, promising that we’d meet at the same place at eight the next morning, and we’d figure this out.”

Thus began an eighteen-month quest to pinpoint the exact location of the shot, involving everything from archival research to drones to very long measuring tapes. It wasn’t easy. For one thing, Baron Haussmann had demolished swaths of the neighborhood in the mid-eighteen-hundreds to create the Place de la République. Van Aertryck and his colleagues turned to prints, paintings, real-estate registers, and topographical maps to re-create Daguerre’s environs, but these pre-photographic renderings had their limits. “We kept just finding engravings of one particular building, because some emperor got shot there,” Van Aertryck recalled. Both Daguerre’s workshop, on what is now Rue Léon-Jouhaux, and a theatre that he owned, called the Diorama, burned in 1839. “No one, not even the biggest nerds who have researched this,” can agree on where, exactly, Daguerre took the photograph, Van Aertryck said, but he and his team were able to determine that three buildings from the era are still standing today. They brought their findings to an architectural firm, which used a 3-D scan of the entire square to triangulate the shoe-shiner’s location. Another architectural firm, using the same data, homed in on a point just a few feet away. “We decided to split the difference,” Van Aertryck explained, scuffing his shoe over a red “X” that had been painted on one of the paving stones, not far from some wads of gum. “A colleague ran out to buy nail polish to mark the spot!” he explained.

For nearly a century, the Bavarian National Museum, in Munich, possessed a photographic plate of the image, which Daguerre had sent to King Ludwig I, but it was badly damaged by restoration efforts during the Second World War—the only remaining physical trace of “Boulevard du Temple” is a photo of the photo that the MoMA curator Beaumont Newhall took in the nineteen-thirties. On October 15th, however, the City of Paris will unveil a plaque commemorating the shoeshine pair—an “unforeseen” detail, the world’s first photographic portrait sitters and the original photobombers at the same time. “I hope people will make it theirs and embrace it as the starting point for something,” Van Aertryck said. May it spawn a million selfies.😂😁😋😌

Let's write about America's violent voting history- In the past Slavery was a divisive issue today it is called "racism"

We often hear that the November 2026, midterms are the most important election in our country’s history. Really❓ 

Honestly, America has gone through worse. Much worse.

Essay opinion published in the Baltimore Sun by Tom Denes

If you think this election season is bad, remember 1876 | GUEST COMMENTARY

The current political turmoil in America is not new. 

During the run-up to the Civil War, people were already shooting at each other. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, pro-slavery Kansas residents, aided by outsiders from Missouri (known as “border ruffians”), voted in a pro-slavery legislature that quickly established pro-slavery laws. Other Kansas residents opposed to slavery, known as “Jayhawkers” and aided by outside abolitionists, set up a separate government and adopted an anti-slavery constitution. President Franklin Pierce called them traitors and threw his administration’s weight behind the pro-slavery legislature. Fights broke out, including an attack by abolitionist fanatic John Brown, who with his followers hacked five pro-slavery settlers to death in an act that became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre.

The violence was not confined to Kansas. In Congress, anti-slavery Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was almost murdered by the cousin of pro-slavery Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina after Sumner launched a personal attack on Butler. The cousin, Rep. Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner in Congress’ chambers, beating him with a cane so badly that Sumner couldn’t attend the Senate for four years.

In 1859, Brown and a band of anti-slavery zealots took over Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start a major slave revolt. For 24 hours, Brown controlled one of the mightiest arsenals in the world, including 100,000 guns. His goal: free the 4 million enslaved people of the United States. It didn’t work, and Brown was hanged.

On the morning of December 2, 1859, Brown rolled to his execution on a wagon, sitting atop his own coffin. Earlier that morning he had composed a note that read: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”

His prediction was right, of course. By the end of the Civil War, more than 600,000 Americans lay dead.

And then there were the voting shenanigans that ended Reconstruction.

In 1876, the presidential election was a cliffhanger. Although Democrat Sam Tilden had won the popular vote (4.3 million to 4 million), neither Tilden nor Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had reached the magic number of 185 electoral votes. Tilden stood one vote shy at 184 electoral votes, and Hayes was well behind at 165 votes.

But the election results in Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina and Oregon were still up for grabs. Both parties claimed the 20 unaccounted-for electoral votes.

Many issues clouded the votes. One was the controversy regarding who could or couldn’t be an elector. If someone held any kind of position with the federal government, he couldn’t be an elector. 

In Florida, one of Hayes’ electors, F.C. Humphreys, held an appointment as a U.S. shipping commissioner. The controversy over his vote was whether he had resigned in time to become a legitimate elector.

To solve the impasse, Congress created an Electoral Commission consisting of five members of Congress, five members of the Senate and five Supreme Court justices. The commission’s makeup was controversial and took a long time to establish. The final seated commission was skewed by exactly one Supreme Court justice on the Republican side. And ultimately each of the 20 electoral votes reviewed by the commission was awarded to Hayes on a party-line vote of 8-7.

Congress still had to approve the commission’s findings. A compromise was forged. The Compromise of 1877 called for the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South, federal funding for infrastructure improvements, the appointment of at least one Southerner to the Cabinet, aid for the Texas and Pacific Railroad and the presidency to Hayes.

Although the republic lived, Reconstruction in the South was over. The notorious Black codes returned. Black residents were jailed for minor crimes and were then used as unpaid laborers, often for years — a de facto return to slavery.

As we approach the 2026 midterms, let’s appreciate how far we’ve come. And, as always, in all elections, please don’t forget to vote.

Tom Denes is the co-author of “The Last President: Our 15-Year Journey Through American History.” He lives in Maryland.

Let's write about film history describing the nuclear age and projecting risks for our future

Opinion | ‘Oppenheimer’ Is the Origin Story. 

Growing up in Dundalk, Maryland, we remember "duck and cover" drills and being told how the Russians had a bulls eye on our location because of our community being so close to Washington D.C. 

This New York Times article gives an interesting retrospective about the realities of what we experienced in the past and how it is reflected in our world today.

The New York Times by W.J. Hennigan and Phoebe Lett

Although Oppenheimer the movie is the origin, these three movies reveal a nuclear present.  (Or, as the French would say- "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"- The more things change the more they stay the same.) 

National security writer W. J. Hennigan spent many years ringing the alarm about the world’s new nuclear era — the subject of At The Brink, a new series from New York Times Opinion — and the crisis on the horizon. For anyone whose interest was piqued by the origin story of nuclear weapons in “Oppenheimer,” Mr. Hennigan, who happens to be a movie buff, recommends three essential films that illuminate our new nuclear era.

W.J. Hennigan: For many years, people haven’t really spent a lot of time thinking about nuclear weapons, but that’s changed — both because of the war in Ukraine as well as the popularity of the recent Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer.”

The idea that a biopic about a scientist and nuclear weapons would be so popular, the fact that it’s won so many awards and has sparked such an interest, is really quite surprising.

For the past quarter-century, an entire generation has come of age without really having to worry about the bomb. has not been something that’s been front of mind.

Nuclear weapons were the predominant national security concern for our country for a half-century, and that was reflected within culture and art. Throughout the Cold War, you could see the topic of nuclear weapons in movies, video games, television shows, cartoons, songs, comic books, board games. There were alcoholic drinks inspired by nuclear weapons.

That kind of changed on a dime after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but even though the concern and awareness over the nuclear peril faded, the danger hasn’t gone away. We’ve entered a new nuclear era, but that’s not being publicly discussed in the way that it has in the past.

I think that movies are the easiest and most accessible way to understand the horrors of nuclear war. So if you’re interested in the history and science behind “Oppenheimer," I have three films that explore the new nuclear era that we’re living through.
My first recommendation is probably no surprise, but: “Dr. Strangelove” by Stanley Kubrick.
Clip from “Dr. Strangelove”
President Merkin Muffley: Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!
Hennigan: When you ask somebody in the nuclear weapons world about what their favorite films are, “Dr. Strangelove” is almost always the answer. It came out in 1964, which was two years after the Cuban missile crisis. I understand that nuclear Armageddon is not something that everybody wants to dive into, but these three films do a really good job in an entertaining way of enlightening you about what’s at stake while also informing you about the current threat that we face today.

“Dr. Strangelove” is about a senior Air Force officer, Gen. Jack Ripper. He uses a loophole in emergency military orders to order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union so that there will be a thermonuclear exchange and the United States will come on top.
Clip from “Dr. Strangelove”
Brig. Gen. Buck Turgidson: … issued an order to the 34 B52s of his wing to, um, attack their targets inside Russia. [The room reacts.]
(Hennigan: He’s obviously gone mad.)
Clip from “Dr. Strangelove”
General Turgidson: And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.
(Hennigan: He’s locked himself into his office. His fear is a Soviet takeover of the world.)
One of the things that “Dr. Strangelove” does really well is it highlights the absurdity of the arms race. At this time in 1964, there were no limits on nuclear stockpiles, so nations could have as many nuclear weapons as they wanted. And this was extremely costly. It cost billions of dollars to invest and maintain these weapons. And the more weapons that there are in the world, the harder it is to have control over them.
Clip from “Dr. Strangelove”
The Soviet ambassador, Alexei de Sadeski: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end, we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race and the peace race.
(Hennigan: It was less than 10 years later before we started introducing arms control measures that would start restricting the numbers of nuclear weapons and the things that you could do with them. And more than half a century later, we’re approaching a world in less than two years where there will be no limitations on nuclear stockpiles here in the United States, or Russia, or anywhere else.)
My second recommendation is “Fail Safe,” directed by Sidney Lumet, from the same year, 1964. This is sort of the strait-laced version of “Dr. Strangelove.” This film shows that even though these intricate, specially designed methods and systems, even if the foremost minds in our world are trying to ensure the fact that something bad can’t happen — it shows human error is always looming overhead.
Clip from “Fail Safe"
Professor Groeteschele: Face facts, Mr. Foster. We’re talking about war. I say every war, including thermonuclear war, must have a winner and a loser. Which would you rather be?
Mr. Foster: In a nuclear war, everyone loses.
(Hennigan: “Fail safe” is a military term of art that came up in the Cold War surrounding nuclear weapons because even if a nuclear weapon or a component failed, it would fail “safe.” It would not fail in an inadvertent detonation.
Clip from “Fail Safe”
Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black: We’re setting up a war machine that acts faster than the ability of men to control it. We’re putting men into situations that are getting too tough for men to handle.
Professor Groeteschele: Then we must toughen the men.
(Hennigan: The film is told from the vantage point of a sitting U. S. president, who is played by Henry Fonda, and what he comes to understand through the course of the film is we’ve vested all these powers in the president, but there are a lot of systems that occur without his delegation of power.)
Clip from “Fail Safe”
Russian translator: Mr. President, we have warned you again and again that this constant flying of armed aircraft over Soviet territory cannot –
President: This is a mistake, a serious mistake. I say it’s a mistake!
(Hennigan: He’s trying to rein back in a system. Once it turns on, it’s almost impossible to stop. I don’t think that a lot of people understand that nuclear weapons are essentially the president’s weapons. There is no other aspect in the U. S. military that operates like the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Only the president has that authority, and he or she does not need to consult Congress or the courts or anyone else in making a decision to use nuclear weapons.)
Clip from “Fail Safe”
President: Yes, it’s my decision, and I take full responsibility.
Hennigan: So, while my first two recommendations show the perspective of the people in power and the decisions they make and how it holds over all of us, the third film I’m going to recommend came out in 1983, and was a TV film called “The Day After.” In my opinion, there is no other film that does a better job at depicting the unnatural horrors of a nuclear detonation than “The Day After.”
But, let me just take a step back. You have to understand that this was in the zeitgeist. Ronald Reagan was president. He was calling the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” and the arms race was back on. There were negotiations about arms control, but the administration at the time was taking a very tough road when it came to the Soviet Union. There was a lot of warnings that were coming from the U.S.S.R. as well.
So, the filmmakers of “The Day After” took it a step further to say, if something went bad in Europe, what would that look like? And it’s not told from New York City. It’s not told from Los Angeles. It’s told from rural Lawrence, Kan., which seemingly wouldn’t be the first target for a incoming missile strike except for the fact that they host intercontinental ballistic missiles in the farm fields.
Clip from “The Day After”
Joe Huxley: That’s about 150 Minuteman missile silos spread halfway down the state of Missouri.
(Hennigan: That is still American policy today. Those missiles are in the Great Plains states to this day.)
Clip from “The Day After”
Joe Huxley: That’s an awful lot of bull's-eyes.
(Hennigan: Nuclear war is not something that you can really wrap your mind around because of the unnatural horror that’s involved in it. And “The Day After” puts it on in full display.)
A narrative that the film does well is that it takes you from the vantage point of average people.
Clip from “The Day After”
News broadcast: — press secretary David Townes reports that both sides are engaged in frank and earnest talks —
(Hennigan: Before the bombs drop, you’re getting information in dribs and drabs. You’re not seeing the whole chessboard. People are hearing things about potential conflict breaking out.)
Clip from “The Day After”
Bruce Gallatin: What’s going on?
Student: They say the Russians just invaded West Germany.
Cynthia: We’re not going to nuke the Russians to save the Germans. I mean, if you were talking oil in Saudi Arabia, then I’d be real worried.
(Hennigan: They’re not really sure what’s occurring, and then all of a sudden there’s a run on groceries.)
Clip from “The Day After”
Grocery store chaos: Out of my way! The batteries!
(Hennigan: And for me, I can relate to that. I think a lot of Americans can relate to that coming out of the pandemic. You start seeing things in the news that are troubling. You don’t really fully understand what the whole picture is.)
Clip from “The Day After”
Jim Dahlberg: Don’t you know there’s pretty much a national emergency going on?
Eve Dahlberg: Well, it’s just going to have to go on without me because your daughter is getting married tomorrow, and I've got 67 mouths to feed.
(Hennigan: But, then you’re like, wow, the whole world has suddenly changed.)
It was deeply researched, and not only is it told from the ground level, but it also has the science to back it up of the dramatic effects of living in an irradiated world.
Clip from “The Day After”
Intake officer: What’s your injury?
Airman Billy McCoy: I, uh, I can’t keep nothing in. Not even my own hair.
(Hennigan: “The Day After” was such an unprecedented exploration of nuclear conflict. It made TV history.)
“ABC7 NY Eyewitness News”: It was a movie like no other movie, and it had a profound impact … We’ll hear from people who, like you, watched the ultimate disaster movie tonight on television.
Hennigan: And, it was so paradigm-shifting that the U.S. government took time on the station afterward to talk directly to the American public about what the risks of nuclear war are.
“ABC7 NY Eyewitness News”: More than 700 people packed Riverside Church tonight to watch “The Day After.’’ Many said they came here because they were afraid to watch it alone. While the TV movie was being shown, the streets of New York were a lot less crowded than usual for a Sunday night.
Hennigan: Not only did it have this cultural impact, but it also swayed policy. Ronald Reagan, famously, after watching “The Day After,” softened his stance and rhetoric surrounding nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union, and indeed, his administration had major breakthroughs in arms control and de-escalation efforts with the U.S.S.R. in the years afterward.

It’s hard to keep the American public’s attention when it comes to arcane subject matters like nuclear weapons, but films and art in general are the most accessible ways for people to understand these very, very difficult subjects. They’re able to stir emotions in people, to provoke them to become more active in their futures. When you’re emotionally stirred and you’re activated to do something.
I don’t think a lot of people are going to find history books and white papers accessible, but these films do a really good job conveying in a way that’s both entertaining as well as being informative. So if you do want to know more, I would recommend watching “Dr. Strangelove,” “Fail Safe,” “The Day After” — and check out our ongoing series, At the Brink.

Let's write about meditations with children, nature and sharing our memories with nature

An reflective essay to share with generations, for meditation and personal memories, published in the Portland Press Herald....

Get out for a walk, forge new memories

At this time of year, get going before the fog has lifted, bring a child (or two) and remember how fortunate we are to be an audience.
By Todd R. Nelson, a former teacher in Penobscot. His essay collections, “Cold Spell” and
“The Land Between the Rivers,” are published by Down East Books.

It is very early. Before pancakes and Cheerios, before the adults have had coffee or truly opened their eyes, before the fog has lifted from the meadow, it is time for a walk.
The dew is in the funnel spider hammocks. The woodland nightshift is clocking out; the day shift beginning. So there’s a chance to see a deer or porcupine finishing their grazing. The birds are the soundtrack: red-eyed vireo, catbird, bobolink, song sparrows are in voice.
And in spot after spot, as cousins Freya and Malcolm and I wander the road, there is a recollection or story. I am having the recollection; they are forming them for the next visit and its walks on this road.
“Here is the very tree where we saw a porcupine up in the branches nibbling,” I say, as we pass the black locust in my neighbor’s yard. I had sent Freya a photo as a “report of nature,” our ritual correspondence. Malcolm concurs.

“And sometimes, when you see a branch or some leaves on the ground, it means ‘Look up.’ There’s a chance the porcupine is still at work.” There is a branch and leaves on the road. A calling card.
The dew is in the funnel spider hammocks. The woodland nightshift is clocking out; the day shift beginning. So there’s a chance to see a deer or porcupine finishing their grazing. The birds are the soundtrack: red-eyed vireo, catbird, bobolink, song sparrows are in voice.
And in spot after spot, as cousins Freya and Malcolm and I wander the road, there is a recollection or story. I am having the recollection; they are forming them for the next visit and its walks on this road.
Stop, look and listen. There is always a critter watching or intending to appear. The wildlife is as intent on a Freya and Malcolm-spotting as vice versa … I like to think.
We too are an audience.
The old apple trees are laden with fruit auguring a bountiful pie crop. The kids take a bite. Too soon, hard and tart. The deer no doubt await the drops, and each year I see a few bucks at my ancient trees savoring the fruit at night.
Here is a handful of blueberries. Yum. And here is a raspberry patch that could attract a bear, which could enjoy the fruit for breakfast, unless we poach them first. We will share. And this stretch of our walk could become The Place Where we Saw a Bear Last Summer … I like to think.
“Look up. See the barren branches? Porcupines have been there,” I explain. “And right there, in the front yard of the green house, I saw a young porcupine just last week.”
“And right here in this spot is where I always see a deer. Or the deer sees me. You never know,” I reflect, “how long a deer has been watching you before it melts back into the woods.”
Here is the branch where an owl likes to perch, and here one where an owl nonchalantly held my gaze for several minutes before flying back to other perches in the woods. Here’s where the skunk scurried by; here where the young buck jumped the fence; here where another porcupine eyed my dog as I kept him at bay. Here’s where the milkweeds are that monarchs love. Here’s where a snake warmed itself on the tarmac. Hear the bullfrogs in the neighbor’s pond?
The walk down these familiar paths reviews our personal history; a family story; a gallery of prior walks and discoveries and eras. But with a young walker it is always fresh, a stocking of their core memory banks.
My pockets fill with pebbles plucked by little fingers from the verge of the road — quartz, circle rocks, the rare and precious double circle rocks, fake slate. A walk is a collection.
My own formative walks come to mind, as I hope Freya and Malcolm’s will, and I am at the old farm in New Hampshire, purchased by my grandparents in the 1950s, still in original condition. The barn had a rope swing, the horse stalls were nibbled and the planks worn by generations of hooves. I can summon the fragrance of the old beams.
There was a hay loft, and a well in the dooryard with a pump handle. In the photo album, I see that it was my grandparents who drilled a modern well for family visits.
My own parents bought an A frame camp farther north, with a dirt road I recall strolling, looking and listening, summer and winter, no doubt their attempt to start new memories and echo the old ones of their camping youths.
And now at my house, in the evening, after s’mores and before bed, when the owls and coyotes are commencing their night shift, we can take another walk and listen far into the dark distance for the story of moonlight and fireflies.

Let's Write about an immigrant Oscar winning actor "Coming to American"- for real.

Coming to America Dept.
Actor Ke Huy Quan Keeps Smiling
Nicely done short essay in....
The New Yorker by Sarah Larsen

On a trip to Liberty Island, the actor Ke Huy Quan, age 55, chats about his new memoir, “Never Say Die,” which chronicles his journey from refugee to child star in “Indiana Jones” to winning an Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” IMDb - 7 Oscars.

Before becoming a child movie star, in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “The Goonies,” the Oscar-winning actor Ke Huy Quan, born in Vietnam to ethnic-Chinese parents, lived with them and his eight siblings over his father’s plastic-bag factory, in Saigon.
He emigrated with his father at age seven, starting with a harrowing boat trip to Hong Kong. He tells the boat story in a new memoir, “Never Say Die”—a “Goonies” reference—and thought of it again on a recent morning in lower Manhattan, as he boarded a ferry called the Miss Liberty. “This brings back memories of the Huey Fong, except that we were way more crowded,” Quan said, climbing the stairs. “And, instead of going up, we went down.” 

Tourists speaking several languages, some wearing foam Statue of Liberty crowns, filled the seats; Quan made his way to an upper-deck railing. He has kind eyes and a gently handsome face; his expressions tend toward earnest. As the ferry headed into the harbor, he gazed out at the Statue of Liberty, which he had never visited before. “I get a bit emotional thinking about this, and remembering some movie scenes that I’ve seen,” he said. “Especially ‘The Godfather Part II.’ ” He got quiet. “All the people coming here, hoping for an opportunity. I think if my dad was alive he’d be very proud.”

On Liberty Island, the path approaches the statue from behind, affording time to contemplate the folds of its enormous cloak. “I wonder what it was like transporting that across the ocean,” Quan said. Reaching the front, he beamed up at its majestic green head—“Ooh, look at that!”—and took a selfie, pointing, in a “Wow!” pose. He wore a black Uniqlo T-shirt of his own design, with yellow script that reads “Keep Smiling.” (Proceeds go to the U.N. Refugee Agency and the Displacement Film Fund.) “I’m going to post that to my I.G. (Instagram) later,” he said.

After arriving in the United States, Quan’s family reunited in Los Angeles’s Chinatown.

One day in 1983, while he and his younger brother, David, were in E.S.L. (English as Second Language) class, they saw kids heading to an open-call movie audition at their school. David wanted to go, too, and Quan accompanied him, coaching him in Cantonese (“Bigger! Look at me—like this!”) and charming casting directors. Soon, Quan himself was at the Warner Bros. lot, auditioning before Harrison Ford, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, who cast him as the impishly heroic Short Round in “Temple of Doom.” (David was happy for him, Quan said.) “I didn’t know who they were,” Quan recalled, sitting on a wall. “I hadn’t seen ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ In fact, I’d never been to a movie theatre. The first time I went to a theatre and watched a movie with a live audience, I was in it.” In the memoir, he recalls the nurturing and kindness of Spielberg, and of Ford, who taught him how to swim. “ ‘Temple of Doom’ helped me kind of reshape what I went through as a kid in a positive way,” he said. “I was having fun and playing a character who was courageous and funny and really enjoying the ride, versus terrified and worried about surviving.” Behind him, tourists took photos with the statue; one happy teen posed like Lady Liberty, her arm raised, holding a novelty torch-shaped lemonade cup.
Seeing Quan, a young blond guy did a double take. “I literally was, like, Oh, my God, my favorite actor from ‘The Goonies’!” he said. Quan posed for some fan pictures, then headed to the lemonade stand.

As a kid, he said, he’d loved being recognized, “but when my career went south”—subsequent roles were smaller, and he eventually worked as a creative consultant for Wong Kar-wai—he didn’t: “I thought I’d peaked at twelve.” (He did, however, meet his wife while working for Wong.) Since the release of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” in 2022, for which he won the Oscar, “I am no longer uncomfortable,” he said. More good roles followed, including in last year’s “Zootopia 2.” “I play Gary De’Snake, a pit viper,” he said. “He may look intimidating, but he’s actually a kind and funny guy with a big heart.”

After a second ferry ride, Quan, sipping from his own torch-shaped lemonade cup, walked through the Ellis Island museum. “So this is the building where all the immigrants came through!” he said, in the sunny hall. He admired sepia-toned photos of immigrant kids holding American flags (“What an incredible thing America did”) and took in exhibits about restrictions and bigotry. He peered at some cartoons from 1882. “The first group of Chinese immigrants to this country were lied to—they ended up doing hard labor,” he said. “I would love to do a movie about that one day.” ♦

Let's write about Musée d'Orsay in Paris exhibit: A Statue For Liberty Bartholdi's Dream virtual tour

 Musée d'Orsay Exhibit by EIN Preswire

(My husband and I are fans of Musée d'Orsay because it easy to access and the galleries are loaded with many famous and amazing paintings we are familiar with. I believe this museum was, at one time, a train station.)

NOW OPEN: Immersive Virtual Reality Experience “A Statue for Liberty: Bartholdi’s Dream” Debuts at the Orsay museum in Paris. This exhibition transports visitors into the heart of one of the 19th century’s most ambitious artistic and technical projects
PARIS, FRANCE, September 16, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Until January 31, 2027, the Musée d’Orsay is hosting the immersive virtual reality experience A Statue for Liberty: Bartholdi’s Dream [Une statue pour la liberté: Le rêve de Bartholdi]

The exabit covers almost 700 m² in the Museum’s Amont Gallery. In coproduction with VIVE Arts and Backlight, the exhibit transports visitors into the heart of one of the 19th century’s most ambitious artistic and technical projects. As the story unfolds, they become active witnesses to the birth of a Franco-American dream that has become one of the universal symbols of liberty.
A STATUE FOR LIBERTY BARTHOLDI’S DREAM
15 Sept. 26 – 31 Jan. 27
Level 0, Amont Gallery
Wearing virtual-reality headsets, visitors walk in Auguste Bartholdi’s footsteps. Developed on the basis of extensive historical research, the experience includes an original reconstruction of the Gaget, Gauthier & Cie workshop.  The exhibition’s curators kept a close eye on the design of the project lending their scientific expertise to ensure faithful re-creations of the historical context and the events involved. The experience takes participants on a sensory journey where scales are constantly changing: from a simple sketch lying on a worktable to the gigantic size of the finished monument, they are physically overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the project. 

During their adventure, they discover the inspirations that fueled the artist’s imagination and the events that gradually shaped his vision.
From the politician Edouard Laboulaye’s drawing room where it all began, by way of the banks of the Nile, where Bartholdi had thought of building a huge lighthouse at the entrance to the Suez Canal, to the political upheavals that shook France and the United States in the second half of the 19th century. Visitors share his enthusiasms as well as his doubts when the project seems doomed to failure: financial problems accumulate, the first models prove to be fragile and the undertaking’s very excessiveness sometimes seems insurmountable. However, driven by unstoppable determination, Bartholdi refuses to give up. Under the public’s eyes, his dream gradually takes shape, from drawing to model, and from model to monument. Virtual reality brings back to life places long since disappeared and immerses visitors in the very heart of this out-of-the-ordinary adventure.
Participants experience the excitement of the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, where the statue’s torch is revealed in order to gain public support, before making their way into the huge Gaget, Gauthier & Cie workshop. Recreated for the first time in virtual reality thanks to in-depth historical research, this now-vanished building has been reborn in all its monumentality. A true industrial cathedral, the workshop bears witness to the tireless activity of almost six hundred workers, craftspeople and journeymen, who spend years working to create the copper colossus designed by Bartholdi. Visitors make their way past scaffolding and gigantic hand-hammered plates and take stock of the technical wonders that Gustave Eiffel invented in order to tackle the unprecedented challenges posed by such a huge monument.
About VIVE Arts
VIVE Arts (HTC) is a global arts and technology initiative redefining how culture is created, experienced, and preserved through the power of digital mediums. VIVE Arts commissions, produces, and distributes groundbreaking immersive experiences in partnership with world-class artists and institutions —expanding creative possibilities for artists and enabling institutions to animate cultural heritage in bold new ways that reach wider audiences. 

With unmatched expertise in the arts, culture, and technology, VIVE Arts empowers artists and institutions to harness immersive arts and technologies. This opens new modes of storytelling, experimentation, and exhibition and fosters a dynamic ecology for digital innovation in the arts, from creation through to distribution. Since its founding in 2017, VIVE Arts has realized more than 75 projects worldwide and stands at the forefront of advancing culture through technology.
Sarah McNaughton, Shea Seery, Lauren Gagnon
Resnicow and Associates
+1 212-671-5161
VIVE...@resnicow.com

Lets Write about "Who Invented Television?" history

Who Invented Television❓📺 in History.com

By Sarah Pruitt a frequent contributor to History.com since 2005, and is the author of Breaking History: Vanished! (Lyons Press, 2017), which chronicles some of history's most famous disappearances.

Multiple inventors deserve credit for television technology, which had its origins in the 19th century.

The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first burst onto the scene in the 1940s and ‘50s and forever transformed American life. 

Decade after decade, TV technology has steadily advanced: Color arrived in the 1960s, followed by cable in the ‘70s, VCRs in the ‘80s and high-definition in the late ‘90s. In the 21st century, viewers are just as likely to watch shows on cell phones, laptops and tablets as on a TV set. Amazingly, however, all these technological changes were essentially just improvements on a basic system that has worked since the late 1930s—with roots reaching even further back than that.

Early TV Technology: Mechanical Spinning Discs

No single inventor deserves credit for the television. The idea was floating around long before the technology existed to make it happen, and many scientists and engineers made contributions that built on each other to eventually produce what we know as TV today.

Television’s origins can be traced to the 1830s and ‘40s, when Samuel F.B. Morse developed the telegraph, the system of sending messages (translated into beeping sounds) along wires. Another important step forward came in 1876 in the form of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which allowed the human voice to travel through wires over long distances.

Both Bell and Thomas Edison speculated about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit images as well as sounds. But it was a German researcher who took the next important step toward developing the technology that made television possible. In 1884, Paul Nipkow came up with a system of sending images through wires via spinning discs. He called it the electric telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television.

TV Goes Electronic With Cathode Ray Tubes

In the early 1900s, both Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton worked independently to improve on Nipkow’s system by replacing the spinning discs with cathode ray tubes, a technology developed earlier by German physicist Karl Braun. A cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube that uses a stream of electrons to create images on a phosphorescent screen. Swinton’s system, which placed cathode ray tubes inside the camera that sent a picture, as well as inside the receiver, was essentially the earliest all-electronic television system.

Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin had worked as Rosing’s assistant before both of them emigrated following the Russian Revolution. In 1923, Zworykin was employed at the Pittsburgh-based manufacturing company Westinghouse when he applied for his first television patent, for the “Iconoscope,” which used cathode ray tubes to transmit images.

Meanwhile, Scottish engineer John Baird gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in central London in 1926. With his new invention, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company, and in 1928 it achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in the mid-Atlantic. Baird is also credited with giving the first demonstration of both color and stereoscopic television.
In 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his all-electronic television system at a convention of radio engineers. In the audience was David Sarnoff, an executive at Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the nation’s biggest communications company at the time. Born into a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Russia, Sarnoff had come to New York City as a child and began his career as a telegraph operator. He was actually on duty on the night of the Titanic disaster; although he likely didn’t—as he later claimed—coordinate distress messages sent to nearby ships, he did help disseminate the names of the survivors.

Sarnoff was among the earliest to see that television, like radio, had enormous potential as a medium for entertainment as well as communication. Named president of RCA in 1930, he hired Zworykin to develop and improve television technology for the company. Meanwhile, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth had been working on his own television system. 

Farnsworth, who grew up on a farm in Utah, reportedly came up with his big idea—a vacuum tube that could dissect images into lines, transmit those lines and turn them back into images—while still a teenager in chemistry class.

In 1927, at the age of 21, Farnsworth completed the prototype of the first working fully electronic TV system, based on this “image dissector.” He soon found himself embroiled in a long legal battle with RCA, which claimed Zworykin’s 1923, patent took priority over Farnsworth’s inventions. The U.S. Patent Office ruled in favor of Farnsworth in 1934 (helped in part by an old high school teacher, who had kept a key drawing by the young inventor), and RCA eventually agreed to pay Farnsworth 💲1 million in licensing fees. However, RCA pursued other litigation and then World War II put a halt on production of most consumer electronics, which delayed RCA paying royalties to Farnsworth. Though viewed by many historians as the true father of television, Farnsworth never earned much from his invention and was dogged by patent appeal lawsuits from RCA. He later moved on to other fields of research and died in debt in 1971.

Although the BBC had begun the world’s first regular TV broadcasts in 1936, Sarnoff used his company's marketing might to introduce the American public to television in a big way at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939. Under the umbrella of RCA’s broadcasting division, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Sarnoff broadcast the fair’s opening ceremonies, including a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Rise of a New Medium

By 1940, there were only a few hundred televisions in use in the United States. With radio still dominating the airwaves—more than 80 percent of American homes owned one at the time—TV use grew slowly over the course of the decade, and by the mid-1940s, the United States had 23 television stations (and counting). By 1949, a year after the debut of the hit variety show Texaco Star Theater, hosted by comedian Milton Berle, the nation boasted 1 million TV sets in use.

By the 1950s, television had truly entered the mainstream, with more than half of all American homes owning TV sets by 1955. 

As the number of consumers expanded, new stations were created and more programs broadcast, and by the end of that decade TV had replaced radio as the main source of home entertainment in the United States. During the 1960 presidential election, the young, handsome John F. Kennedy had a noticeable advantage over his less telegenic opponent, Richard M. Nixon in televised debates, and his victory that fall would bring home for many Americans the transformative impact of the medium.