#the Franklin institute

[putting-pomni-in-places]

Put her in the Franklin institute

[science70]

New Spaces: The Holographer's Vision catalogue, curated by Karen Spitulnik Peiffer (Franklin Institute Press, 1979).

Cover art: Rudie Berkhout

[arabella-strange]

[Silver gelatin print. Maker: William N. Jennings. The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.]

[bappa1324]

[ami-ven]

Happy 70th Birthday, Giant Heart!

[terrificallytoni]

100 Years of Disney Magic on Display at the Franklin Institute

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch:

The New York Times profiled the MAGA movement organization America First Policy Institute this week. AFPI was created as a sort of Trump administration in exile after voters dumped Donald Trump from office. AFPI has provided jobs and salaries to a lot of Trump loyalists, who are working to put Trump—and themselves—back into power. And they’re preparing to make the most of that power. AFPI’s own version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a new administration reportedly includes nearly 300 executive orders for a returning Trump to sign. Right Wing Watch reported last year on an AFPI summit called “Laying the Groundwork for the Next America First Administration,” at which the group’s president Brooke Rollins bragged about the “revolutionary” nature of its ambitions to “seize control of the administrative state and use it—while also dismantling it,” describing “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”

Now that there’s bad blood between MAGA insiders and the Heritage Foundation over the unfavorable publicity Project 2025 brought Trump’s campaign, AFPI is positioned to be in control of the transition team and domestic policy agenda if Trump wins. One example of what that could look like: the Times reports that AFPI’s plan to allow Trump to fire federal employees and replace them with political loyalists is even more radical than Project 2025’s proposal—it would essentially turn the entire federal workforce into a political patronage system. 

One important aspect of AFPI’s work that this week’s Times story did not explore is AFPI’s partnership with dominionist Lance Wallnau and his “Courage Tour” to turn out conservative Christian voters in crucial swing-state counties in the upcoming election. As the Times noted, one of AFPI’s funders and board members is Texas pastor-billionaire Tim Dunn, whose funding and theocratic vision have been aggressively pushing the Texas Republican Party further to the far right. 

Right Wing Watch has reported that the Courage Tour blends religious revivalism, spiritual warfare rhetoric, right-wing politics, and targeted voter turnout work all designed to overcome “demonic strongholds” and put Trump back into the White House. Some other media reports on the Courage Tour have noted the partnership and described the participation of America First Works—AFPI’s political action affiliate—and its voter registration efforts. Wallnau and AFPI have focused on 19 crucial counties in swing states that they believe could swing the election for Trump with increased turnout from MAGA-minded Christians. 

The extent of the partnership between AFPI and New Apostolic Reformation dominionists like Wallnau is revealed in video from a Michigan stop on the Courage Tour in May. Wallnau described AFPI as “the group I work with,” adding that it “is holding the key appointment for the hoped-for Trump administration….They’ve got all the placeholders for who’s going in.”  Wallnau introduced Richard Rogers, who is affiliated with Georgia-based MAGA pastor Jentezen Franklin’s Free Chapel church, and who is serving as AFPI’s national director of faith engagement. He got that assignment, Rogers said, when AFPI called Franklin saying that the movement did not have enough resources on the ground to actually do the necessary voter registration and turnout in those targeted counties. Rogers went to work, he said, and now AFPI has a “faith department” that has been built “to put boots on the ground to motivate the voters in those states to turn the tide on the election in 2024—and we’re doing it.”

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) has an agenda that is more radical than even the discredited mess that Project 2025.

[novelswithariana]

Season 2 Episode 22

Janine: Wait. So you did watch "Night at the Museum"? Gregory: Yeah. I take all your recommendations seriously. I want to know why you like stuff.

[longreads]

Two stories tall, 100 times the width of my heart and yours, the giant heart looks alien. It consumes half the room. Its bulbous red self is gripped claw-like by raised blue veins and red arteries. A red aorta emerges from its top. A blue vena cava hugs its right side like the trunk of a ghastly Seussian-blue tree. These vessels ascending from and extending into different parts of the Heart Wing suggest that the entire museum is somehow subsumed by the circulatory system of a giant. The museum says this heart befits someone 220 feet tall.

You can enter the giant heart. You can let proportion shrink you to the size of a blood molecule and traverse the four chambers, through tricuspid, pulmonary, mitral, and aortic valves. That is, you can do so if you aren’t in a wheelchair or don’t need handrails to manage steep steps. And you might do so if you aren’t yet menopausal like one of my museum guests and aren’t sent into raging hot flashes — because the giant heart is warm as blood and stuffy as a concert port-a-potty. Bipedal and of (albeit waning) reproductive years, I round the back of the 28-foot-wide organ, walk along a muddy-pink wall that’s lumpy and gently marbleized and meant, I’m assuming, to evoke the unsettling aliveness of human flesh. I duck beneath a big blue artery. The drumming gets louder.

I have not yet said this: The entire Heart Wing throbs with a nonstop lub-dub, lub-dub. Deep as a bass drum, pulsing about once per second, it’s the constant auditory reminder that the organ in your chest can’t stop, can’t stop, can’t stop. This means that, if you’re like me, the zone under your ribs — just slightly left of your sternum — starts to ache.

If you've ever been to The Franklin Institute's Giant Heart exhibit, our latest feature is a must read. If you haven't, Heather Lanier’s “The Heart Wing” will transport you there.

[adamsmasher]

[everydayesterday]

I recommend philadelphia if you want to be a tourist in america. a handsome and distinguished yet modern downtown, historic buildings and museums with excellent period architecture. parks and boulevards. pop culture. photo opportunities. the drives along the river are verdant and pretty.

[hotels are expensive. parking can be expensive if you're picky about location. stay away from the so-called expressway.]

[https-hunter]

I’m calling it now, Abbott season 3 field trip to Independence Hall

[vnknowcrow]

Being a #1 hater to miscommunication stories and also a abbott elementary fan is like being stabbed twenty times every episode

[phthalology]

Specifically the end of 1899 irritated me because I wanted Maura to know more about her own self, to regain some of the power she supposedly had. But it's also a potent metaphor for creativity, for being a woman/person behind the scenes, for hesitating to claim that you made something because there are others ready to take or give away the credit. For not understanding your own creative process. For the frustration of crawling along in a project in the dark. Eyk loves the ship but Maura guides the journey

[ami-ven]

Happy National Ben Franklin Day!

[mxmuffin]

I had a dream last night that I was on a school trip to the Franklin Institute with my Dad as one of the chaperones, and it felt so real for some reason.

This is going to be a long post, so uh, read under the cut if you want

Unfortunately, the museum was mostly empty, since my own knowledge on things is limited, but there was an assembly made by one of the students on my trip that I saw the day before in real life, and made a speech about how there's barely any LGBTQ+ history in the museum. Then, me and my Dad went around the museum again and I slid down an escalator, which was fun, until when I slid down one in front of a teacher (who was my biology teacher), and she said "Alright! That's it! I've asked you for the last time to stop doing that, but now everyone's leaving the museum NOW."

The trip wasn't even over yet, and apparently we were all banned from the museum for this. I was so mad at the teacher and the museum for banning me for something my Dad didn't even think was bad, and it wasn't like anyone was at the museum to get hurt but me. Another part of the reason that we were all banned was because of that student's speech I said happened before, so I was even more mad.

Like I said before the weird thing about this dream was how real it felt, because I remember that we walked out of the building to a sidewalk to wait for our buses to take us home, and I sat there on the sidewalk waiting. The weather was even dreary and the grass felt wet. Next to me, someone took out their phone while I took out mine and literally started going through Tumblr. I even passed a post that said something about how they didn't know people could be banned from museums, to which I liked and reblogged.

But the dream continues, and now I feel soul-crushing guilt for what I did, since I really liked going to the Franklin Institute, and I then just went home and laid in my bed on my phone while I heard my Mom ask my Dad about the trip. It wasn't until I then accidentally woke up did I realize that shit was just a dream. I even woke up and still felt guilty for a bit.

I don't even know how this dream came into fruition, except for the fact that most of the characters I met in my dream were real people I saw last night for a social thing, including my biology teacher (who I don't really like in real life for different reasons). I don't know how my brain came up with museums either, so now I'm just starting to think that I accidentally looked into an alternative universe of myself, with my biggest proof being that I saw my Aunt there, and when I said hi to her, she didn't immediately go to me to say hi back and just kept walking. Also, she doesn't even leave the state, so her going to Philadelphia to go to the Franklin Institute by herself seems weird.

Anyways, what the fuck was that dream and now I want to punch my biology teacher even more.