Triple Self-Portrait
The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960 (cover)
Oil on canvas (44 1/2 x 34 3/4 in.)
The Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts

I remain on the white picket fence about whether Norman Rockwell is a great artist. But on a recent Sunday, seeking escape from the blistering heat of the Washington streets in a crowded exhibition of the artist’s work drawn from the personal collections of filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lukas, the question seemed almost irrelevant. Rockwell is a consummate entertainer, and the easy appeal of his work remains undimmed more than 30 years after his death.

With policies to reign in greenhouse gas emissions stalled both nationally and internationally, some scientists are exploring alternative ways to cool the planet, such as shooting reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, fertilizing the oceans with iron filings to stimulate the growth of carbon-dioxide–hungry plankton, and other geoengineering interventions.

“Poland’s New Ambitions,” journalist Andrew Curry’s Spring ’10 piece, described how Poland has made democracy promotion a foreign aid priority, funding Belarusian radio stations, training programs for Georgian civil society activists, and scholarships for Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz students to study at Polish universities.   

Four million slaves were freed during the Civil War, but audio testimonies of only 26 former slaves have survived to this day, with a meager 10 accompanied by photographs of the people interviewed. That these few accounts exist at all is largely due to the Works Progress Administration, which hired unemployed folklorists, historians, and writers to interview 2,000 former slaves scattered across America between 1936 and 1938. The Library of Congress has excerpts of seven of the audio interviews on its website as part of its American Memory Project.  (A more complete compilation is available here, and HBO dramatized the interviews in the 2003 documentary film, Unchained Memories.)