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THIS WEEK’S NEW EPISODE
This week’s guest is Dr. Anne Richardson, the chief experience officer of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. We talk about the museum’s weekly 18+ event After Dark, its semi-controversial forays into AI, and how its staff figures out what makes a good exhibit. Plus: The Exploratorium’s work with new science centers in Brazil, Korea, and Kenya.
Find the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify — or find your favorite app here! A full transcript of this episode is available here.
BEHIND THE SCENES
🙌 We made it!
With this episode out, Season One of Call ‘Em Like Museum is officially complete!
But don’t worry, we’re just getting started. I have been talking to folks about some really fun things we can do with season 2, and while all of that is cooking, I’ll be putting out regular bonus episodes in all the usual places. So keep an eye out for extra stories that were cut for time; new interviews with museum fans & curators; and audio from my tours of the museums you’ve heard on this show.
Thank you to everyone who has helped make this show a reality — which includes all of our amazing guests and their marketing reps, of course, but also Rhe Civitello, Julia Wilde, Elizabeth Crane, and my extraordinarily patient partner Reya, who nearly contained her jealousy when I would leave the house in the middle of the day to get a private museum tour.
— Eric
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IN MY INBOX
🐭 The WDFM, Afrofuturism, and a silver hoard
On Saturday, I brought a group of 16 alumni from Brown (my alma mater) to the Walt Disney Family Museum, which I featured earlier this year on the podcast. Thank you so much to everyone who came out for the event!
A trip to the Bellarmine Museum of Art provided the data for a new study about photos & memory: “Students were less accurate at recognizing the objects they had photographed, and they could answer fewer questions about those objects’ visual details, than the ones they had only looked at.” [Grazia]
I have just under a year to contrive a trip to southeastern Virginia, to see Hampton University’s new temporary exhibit, “Ruth E. Carter Afrofuturism in Costume Design.” Carter won two Oscars for the Black Panther movies, but basically every movie with her name on it is gorgeous. [Forbes]
John Mulaney used to do a bit about studios spending $100 million to make a movie, when they could just sell admission to see $100 million in one place. Anyway, that’s where my mind went when I read that The Museum of Somerset in the UK is getting ready to display “a hoard of 2,584 silver pennies from the time of the Norman conquest.” Alas, the hoard is worth “only” £4,420,527. [BBC]
The Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans in France has successfully recovered a painting from its collection that was looted in 1940, thanks to a “poster campaign features the words ‘WANTED’ written in chunky, all caps in American Old Western font.” [ARTnews]
THE GIFT SHOP
🎁 A perfect gift for podcast lovers
Kitsville
You have LESS THAN ONE DAY left to enter our Gift Shop Giveaway! But if you’re already subscribed to this newsletter, then you’re already in. (Full rules here)
(Not subscribed yet? You can do that right here.)
One of the prize packages sent to winners will include this voice recorder STEM kit I picked up in the Exploratorium gift shop. Make your own museum podcast (up to 60 seconds at a time) while you wait for season 2! 😀 The winner will also get stickers, postcards, and maybe some surprise goodies!
💪 How to help the podcast:
Tell a friend: Forward this email to a museum lover in your life
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Before we go … here’s one of those robot baristas we mention at the end of the episode. It feels like they’ve been a year away from being a Thing for like 10 years, at least? I’m skeptical, as you can tell, but it is still mesmerizing to watch it work.