The Deck Nobody Played
Fifty-two cards from the 1470s, in near-perfect condition. That is the problem, and also the reason they exist.
Filthy Objects
Museum objects and the stories the labels leave out. Filthy means caked in everything that has happened to them.
Live Last read · last published · next check
Latest posts
The Squirrel on the Chain
Nobody knew who she was until 2004, when a stained-glass historian noticed some squirrels in a window
The Face That Went Away
A photograph of Lincoln before the beard, before the war, before any of it. The face lasted months. The plate that recorded it lasted seventy-three years, and then someone mailed it.
Something You Licked
A father commissioned a portrait of his son and heir. The boy died at thirteen, and the picture became the most reproduced image of a child in Britain.
Seven Years
She did almost all of her collecting in seven years of widowhood. It was one of the great American collections, and it was sold off in a week.
The Dress That Became a Tablecloth
Elizabeth I owned thousands of gowns. One survives, and only because somebody cut it up.
The Room He Would Not Explain
Degas painted one picture unlike anything else he made, kept it for thirty-five years, and never said what was happening in it.
Nine Teeth, Six Pounds
Everyone knows Washington’s teeth were wooden. They weren’t, and the truth is worse than the myth was built to hide.
The Only Honest Painting in the Building
Magritte painted a pipe, wrote “this is not a pipe” under it, and became the only thing in the museum telling the truth. Then we put it on a tote bag.
The Same Snake
Franklin’s “Join, or Die,” the most famous cartoon in early American history, and the empire it was first drawn to serve.
The Door That Never Opened
Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the unfinished door to a museum that was never built, and the masterpieces cut out of it.