I’ve got my Halloween candy ready for the trick-or-treaters and a plan for how I’m going to decorate my front door with construction paper bats, but it was still a bit of a surprise to arrive at the museum this morning and find half my colleagues dressed (tastefully, of course) for Halloween. I should have…
ZA is a perfectly good word. You know, like PIZZA. While you probably wouldn’t use (or eat) ZA in a formal social setting, it’s a two-letter word that might help boost your next Scrabble game. Surprised that ZA is a legal word? Don’t be. The entire world of Scrabble terms can be pretty surprising. From…
You might not think of museum curators as showoffs, but we are. Personally, I love speaking in public and appearing on TV. However, the type of showing off that curators like best is the kind that involves sharing our collections with the world. Sometimes we show off our collections in museum exhibits or at educational…
Joseph Campbell, the scholar of comparative myth whose work inspired the Star Wars saga, reminded us that every archetypal hero of fable and fiction is drawn into an adventure, enlists the support of trusted comrades, passes alone beyond a threshold of ordinary endurance, survives the crucial ordeal, and then remerges steeled and restored. Whether his…
