Author: Rebecca Lemov File Type: pdf Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other innovative scientific protocols. Kaplan, along with anthropologist A. I. Hallowell and a team of researchers, sought out a varied range of non-European subjects among remote and largely non-literate peoples around the globe. Recording their dreams, stories, and innermost thoughts in a vast database, Kaplan envisioned future researchers accessing the data through the cutting-edge Readex machine. Almost immediately, however, technological developments and the obsolescence of the theoretical framework rendered the project irrelevant, and eventually it was forgotten. **Review Unique, well-curated brain food for readers intrigued with the human psyche and how it can be recorded, indexed, and cross-referenced.Kirkus Reviews (Kirkus Reviews) Humane, hilarious, and smart . . . The book shows that, although some things are forgotten because they are unimportant, others lose importance because they are forgotten.Science (Science) Lemov, a professor of the History of Science at Harvard, recollects with flair, affection and dazzling detail, a post World War II project to do away with mornings after like this one those episodes of mourning that follow some lost telling of some last secret of some human heart. . . . Riveting.New Republic (New Republic) A compelling account.Wall Street Journal (Wall Street Journal) Lemovs contribution informs our understanding not only of how psychological research is managed but also of our own daily contributions, voluntary and otherwise, to a forever database already being probed in increasingly intimate fashion.Psychology Today (Psychology Today) About the Author Rebecca Lemovis associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University and past visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She is the author of World as Laboratory Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, named a 2006 New York Times Editors Choice. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Author: Nathalia Brodskaya File Type: pdf For Claude Monet the designation impressionist always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Yet the little boy began by drawing caricatures. Boudin advised Monet to stop doing caricatures and to take up landscapes instead. The sea, the sky, animals, people, and trees are beautiful in the exact state in which nature created them surrounded by air and light. Indeed, it was Boudin who passed on to Monet his conviction of the importance of working in the open air, which Monet would in turn transmit to his impressionist friends. Monet did not want to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He chose to attend a private school, LAcademie Suisse, established by an ex-model on the Quai dOrfevres near the Pont Saint-Michel. One could draw and paint from a live model there for a modest fee. This was where Monet met the future impressionist Camille Pissarro. Later in Gleyres studio, Monet met Auguste Renoir Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille. Monet considered it very important that Boudin be introduced to his new friends. He also told his friends of another painter he had found in Normandy. This was the remarkable Dutchman Jongkind. His landscapes were saturated with colour, and their sincerity, at times even their naivete, was combined with subtle observation of the Normandy shores variable nature. At this time Monets landscapes were not yet characterized by great richness of colour. Rather, they recalled the tonalities of paintings by the Barbizon artists, and Boudins seascapes. He composed a range of colour based on yellow-brown or blue-grey. At the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877 Monet presented a series of paintings for the first time seven views of the Saint-Lazare train station. He selected them from among twelve he had painted at the station. This motif in Monets work is in line not only with Manets Chemin de fer (The Railway) and with his own landscapes featuring trains and stations at Argenteuil, but also with a trend that surfaced after the railways first began to appear. In 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. At Giverny, series painting became one of his chief working procedures. Meadows became his permanent workplace. When a journalist, who had come from Vetheuil to interview Monet, asked him where his studio was, the painter answered, My studio! Ive never had a studio, and I cant see why one would lock oneself up in a room. To draw, yes to paint, no. Then, broadly gesturing towards the Seine, the hills, and the silhouette of the little town, he declared, Theres my real studio.Monet began to go to London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He began all his London paintings working directly from nature, but completed many of them afterwards, at Giverny. The series formed an indivisible whole, and the painter had to work on all his canvases at one time. A friend of Monets, the writer Octave Mirbeau, wrote that he had accomplished a miracle. With the help of colours he had succeeded in recreating on the canvas something almost impossible to capture he was reproducing sunlight, enriching it with an infinite number of reflections. Alone among the impressionists, Claude Monet took an almost scientific study of the possibilities of colour to its limits it is unlikely that one could have gone any further in that direction.