{"id":591,"date":"2011-04-21T12:51:52","date_gmt":"2011-04-21T17:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=591"},"modified":"2017-01-12T20:45:01","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T01:45:01","slug":"three-museum-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=591","title":{"rendered":"Three museum reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American Museum of Natural History<\/a><\/strong> has two temporary exhibits that are drawing large crowds.\u00a0 One, Brain: The Inside Story<\/a>, I can attest is worth a visit the next time you’re in NYC.\u00a0 From the New York Times review<\/a>, I’d been worried that the exhibit would be full of la-de-da generalities: “how marvelously complicated is the brain!\u00a0 how little we understand about it!”\u00a0 But it turned out that was just the review.\u00a0\u00a0 The exhibit itself does a pretty good job of summarizing what’s known about how the brain is organized, how it develops, how various drugs affect it, and more.\u00a0 One highlight for me was a model brain that you can take apart to see how the brain stem, limbic system, and cerebral cortex fit together—something that 2D images had never successfully conveyed to me.\u00a0 The other exhibit, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs<\/a>, was sold out for the entire day when we tried to go there, so we had to content ourselves with the smaller dinosaurs in the rest of the museum.<\/p>\n

The Mark Twain House and Museum<\/a><\/strong> in Hartford, Connecticut, should be avoided at all costs.\u00a0 On a recent visit, I and my family of Twain fans were snidely turned away since we hadn’t booked a tour—a requirement buried in the website, which someone googling for the opening hours would almost certainly miss.\u00a0 (This despite the fact that the museum wasn’t crowded, and we could have easily joined a tour that was starting as we arrived.)\u00a0 So don’t suffer the petty bureaucrats who curate Twain’s legacy, and treat the town of Hartford the way they’d apparently like you to: as a bathroom stop along the highway from New York to Boston.\u00a0 Twain would’ve been amused.<\/del> Jeffrey Nichols, Executive Director of the Mark Twain House, left me a personal apology in comments section.\u00a0 I thank him warmly for that, and maybe I will<\/em> visit again sometime—though it will help if I have some way of knowing I won’t just be turned away again! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum<\/a><\/strong> in Jerusalem has been redesigned since the last time I was there, in 2002.\u00a0 In the old Yad Vashem, you walked around more-or-less randomly looking at the exhibits; in the new one, you proceed in a more linear order (similar to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum<\/a> in Washington DC): from the rise of Nazism to the first anti-Jewish laws to the ghettoes to the gas chambers and crematoria.\u00a0 The tour ends powerfully, with the Hall of Names (a large circular room with photos of victims and bookshelves of data about 3.8 million of them), followed by a balcony with a spectacular view of West Jerusalem—as if the building itself is trying to explain why the country it’s in exists.\u00a0 I recommend a visit, even if you’ve been to Yad Vashem before its redesign in 2005.\u00a0 But be careful to check the opening hours: the first time my family and guests tried to visit, the museum was closing, we were turned away, and we ended up going instead to a rest stop full of Elvis statues, where people lined up to use the bathroom and bought Elvis t-shirts.\u00a0 (I thought that belonged in some anthology of Jewish humor.)<\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong> While the world’s museums have a great deal to teach us, they ought to devote more of their attention to the fundamental tasks of being open<\/strong> and letting people in<\/strong>.\u00a0 People turned away from a museum are not just lost customers: they’ve often spent hours getting to an unusual place, and may be so annoyed by the wasted trip that they won’t want to return, even if they have the opportunity to do so.\u00a0 In two of the cases above, I checked the website beforehand and that didn’t <\/em> suffice, since the key information I needed wasn’t there or was buried.\u00a0 Yeah, I suppose I could call <\/em> ahead before every museum visit, but I hate doing that.\u00a0 If someone wants to start CanIActuallyGetInToTheMuseum.com, it could be a fantastic way to not make any money.<\/p>\n

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The American Museum of Natural History has two temporary exhibits that are drawing large crowds.\u00a0 One, Brain: The Inside Story, I can attest is worth a visit the next time you’re in NYC.\u00a0 From the New York Times review, I’d been worried that the exhibit would be full of la-de-da generalities: “how marvelously complicated is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-meatspace","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3143,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions\/3143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}