Quoted: A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.... the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

Quoted: The influence of Surrealism, to which the Czechs responded with alacrity, is evident. Jan Lukas worked Dalíesque wonders with three snail shells and their elongated shadows, and he veers close to abstraction when photographing the underside of a modern staircase.

Quoted: The earliest piece, an expertly finished sandstone stele of the meditating Buddha dated 462 A.D., retains some of the sweet, yielding organicism of contemporaneous Indian art. But within a few decades into the Northern Wei period (386-534 A.D.), this model undergoes alteration. The limbs are stretched, the body flattened, the face squared off, the faint smile replaced, as often as not, by an emphatic grin.

They look like such nice people... includes a slideshow.

Quoted: they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers ...rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

Good source of information on old Nikon/Nikkor camera bodies and lenses.

Quoted: It was in 1507, with the publication of a large cut-out map suitable for creating a do-it-yourself globe, that Vespucci’s first name, if not Vespucci himself, achieved lasting renown. On this map, published in the intellectual backwater of St. Dié in Lorraine, the designation “America” (the feminine of Amerigo) was chosen for the portion of the hemisphere where Vespucci claimed to have landed during his second voyage.

Quoted: In Krakow, a new generation of non-Jewish Poles is rediscovering a culture that was nearly annihilated by the Holocaust.

I suppose this is one way to come to terms with a ghastly past.

Quoted: Should Yale University return its relics of Machu Picchu? And who in Peru would actually benefit if it does?

Of course this has implications beyond the Yale-Peru spat.

Quoted: Neo Rauch’s lugubrious canvases, filled with theatrical, inchoate scenes and clunky figures, feel dutiful and full of echoes.