The Washington Post | By Fritz Hahn | June 23, 2026
This is a gift 🎁 link to this informative & beautiful interactive history of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Above is a GIF made from some of the photos. Below are a few more photos, but I recommend you see and interact with the post for yourself, using the above link.
The Solidarity Marchers cooling off in the Reflecting Pool in 1968. (Keystone/Getty Images)
A midsummer morning surprise birthday breakfast at dawn in 1974. (The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
An inauguration celebration with tens of thousands on hand as Bill Clinton took office in 1993. (Dana Walker/Getty Images)
People exercise near the Reflecting Pool in November 2015. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
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GIF Photo Descriptions : 1) Civil rights activists gather in and around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during the Poor People’s March on Washington in 1968. (Pictorial Parade/Getty Images); 2) Work begins on the new Lincoln memorial grounds and the Reflecting Pool. (Bettmann/Bettmann Archive); 3) An amphibious aircraft on the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1923. (Library of Congress/Library of Congress); 4) A group of young boys playing in the Reflecting Pool in 1926. (Photo 12/Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images); 5) A group of men and boys prepare their toy sailboats for launch in 1928. (Interim Archives/Getty Images)
Narrative on GIF's Second Slide: A reflecting pool at the western end of the National Mall was included in the 1902 McMillan Plan, which guided the creation of D.C.’s monumental core. Designed by Henry Bacon, also the architect of the Lincoln Memorial, it was dedicated in 1922 and quickly became a popular recreation destination for D.C. residents.
NOTE: Above photos & GIF photos/ graphic formatting were slightly modified from their original source for greater clarity.
This is for a spotlight/appreciation type article about Adam Silvera, since INFINITY SON will be releasing soon! The article will be published on Nerds and Beyond closer to the book's release.
Coming out of Tumblr retirement to share this: I am writing another article about Adam Silvera for INFINITY SON’s release, and this one is interactive! If you like Adam and his books, now is your chance to tell everyone. If you know someone who is an Adam Silvera fan, share it with them, too! To participate, all you have to do is fill out the form (not all questions require answers, but I do encourage you to answer them all). The article will be posted through the website Nerds and Beyond closer to the release of the book. Thank you!
American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
Read all the stories. [Interactive links, photos, audio recordings]
While it’s tempting to downplay or dismiss these efforts as the pathetic machinations of crackpots and fringe figures, that would be a mista
This is an excellent NY Times interactive article, so the above link is a gift 🎁 link so anyone can read the entire article, even if they don't subscribe to the NY Times. Here are some excerpts.
Upending the outcome of a free and fair presidential election is no minor endeavor. It requires time, energy, money and, especially, an awful lot of people willing to do the wrong thing — or at least go along with it.
The network of people who allegedly helped Donald Trump try, without success, to stay in power more than two and a half years ago may seem hopelessly chaotic, but there was a method to the madness. American elections are, by design, entrusted to the states and therefore decentralized. To meddle in them requires national masterminds working hand in glove with plotters at the state and local levels — a tangle of conspirators, enablers and indulgent bystanders as messy and sprawling as our democracy itself. And while it can be tempting to downplay or dismiss the entire nightmare as the pathetic machinations of crackpots and fringe figures or even to wave it off as ancient history, that would be a mistake.
Those who worked to overturn the 2020 election are the same kinds of people and groups Mr. Trump would surely surround himself with if elected to a second term: unscrupulous or timid federal and state officials, ethically flexible lawyers and Republican yes men and women. Except that in 2025 those figures would have a better sense of how to dismantle the guardrails that once stood in their way and how to exploit the fault lines and weaknesses in our electoral process.
[emphasis added]
Below is the final graphic in the article that shows all the people connected with Trump's coup attempt, including some who refused to go along with it:
This interactive article is well worth reading, and I invite you to use the above gift link to do so.
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The text of this article is by Michelle Cottle; the graphics are by Taylor Maggiacomo and Norman Eisen.
Most people now live in countries where two or fewer children are born for every two adults.
This is a troubling article by UT Austin economist Dan Spears on predictions that world population growth will peak sometime during the 2060s to 2080s, and then will rapidly decline. We all know on some level that human population growth cannot continue at this pace, but the sudden drop that experts predict in the near future is alarming--as are the predicted consequences of a rapid human population decline.
This is a gift 🎁 link that will enable anyone to read the full article, whether or not they subscribe to The New York Times. Here are some excerpts from this interactive article.
The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today—growing up while the world is growing rapidly—may be a blip in human history.
Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth.A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.
And then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.
Because most demographers look ahead only to 2100, there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
The article goes on to say:
[...] What would happen as a consequence [of a rapid decline in human population]? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.
I encourage you to read the rest of this article. Whether or not one agrees with Dr. Spears's arguments, they are thought provoking.
[edited]
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Sara Chodosh created the graphics in the article, which were used to create the above gifs.
Queen Elizabeth II: A visual timeline of her 70 years on the throne | The Washington Post | May 31, 2022
The Washington Post put together a wonderful interactive pictural timeline to celebrate the 7 decades that Elizabeth II has been Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms. The above photos/gifs are just a sampling of what is in the article. It is well worth your time to take a look if you are interested in Elizabeth II and the British royal family.
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Gifs were made from the interactive graphics in the article, which combined the photographic portrait of Elizabeth II by John Hedgecoe {1966) and the illustrations by Marianna Tomaselli for The Washington Post. The design/production/graphics for the interactive article were by Frank Hulley-Jones and Sarah Hashemi. Ruby Mellen and Adela Suliman provided the reporting. Note that all photos and illustrations were modified from their original sources.
Readers speak about the meaning of pregnancy, choice and motherhood in their lives.
This interactive opinion article is well worth reading and listening to (as all the stories were recorded by the authors). Below is one of the seven stories. If you have the time, I encourage you to read and listen to the rest of these very moving stories.
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All gifs were made from the interactive article but the order of presentation has been modified.
The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents.
Below are some of the images and excerpts from this interactive article in The Washington Post. I encourage people to read the full article, it is very informative. The article also provides a searchable the database.
[NOTE: All emphasis was added to all excerpts in this post.]
[....] More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.
The country is still grappling with the legacy of their embrace of slavery. The link between race and political power in early America echoes in complicated ways, from the racial inequities that persist to this day to the polarizing fights over voting rights and the way history is taught in schools.
The Washington Post created a database that shows enslavers in Congress represented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states.
Some were owners of enormous plantations, like Sen. Edward Lloyd V of Maryland, who enslaved 468 people in 1832 on the same estate where abolitionist Frederick Douglass was enslaved as a child. Many exerted great influence on the issue of slavery, like Sen. Elias Kent Kane, who enslaved five people in Illinois in 1820, and tried to formally legalize slavery in the state.
[See more under the cut.]
William Richardson, for example, a Democrat who fought for the Confederacy, died in office in 1914 after representing Alabama for 14 years. Another Democrat, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a suffragist and a white supremacist, was appointed to fill a Senate vacancy in 1922 and briefly represented Georgia at age 87. The first woman ever to serve in the Senate was a former slaveholder.
Enslavers came from all parts of the political spectrum.... lawmakers who were members of more than 60 political parties. Federalists, Whigs, Unionists, Populists, Progressives, Prohibitionists and dozens more: All those parties included slaveholders.
The most common political affiliation among enslavers was the Democratic Party — 606 Democrats in Congress were slaveholders.
While the early Republican Party is associated with abolition, The Post found 481 slaveowners who identified as Republicans at some point in their elected careers. [....]
[....] Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said he thinks about that history in the halls of Congress, from the portraits on the walls to the votes once taken there.
“I’m very conscious of this as only the fourth Black person popularly elected to the United States Senate. … The very monuments you walk past: There’s very little acknowledgment of the degree that slavery, that wretched institution, shaped the Capitol,” Booker said in an interview. He added, “All around you, the very Capitol itself, was shaped by this legacy that we don’t fully know or don’t fully acknowledge.”
The same is true of the White House. Of the first 18 U.S. presidents, 12 were enslavers, including eight during their presidencies. [....]
[....] Today, as America struggles with how to understand its history and which historical figures to honor, many of these lawmakers’ statues stand in town squares across the country, and their names adorn streets and public schools, with almost no public acknowledgment that they were enslavers.
The men, women and children they enslaved are less recognized still, often recorded in a census by just their age and gender, without even a name. [....]
[NOTE: Above is a screencap of a part of the searchable database.]
[....] Determining whether a lawmaker enslaved others does not reveal everything about his role in maintaining or questioning the institution of slavery.
[....]
For Crystal Feimster, a Black historian at Yale University, a full accounting of these stories from American history is essential to understanding America today.
“There is a way in which people want to disconnect and say, ‘I didn’t own slaves. My family didn’t own slaves. So let’s keep moving,’ ” she said. “We have to tell them why it’s important and why it matters and what it tells about where we are in this present moment.”
She pointed to voting rights, the vast racial wealth gap and the disproportionate impact of violence on people of color as examples of current-day struggles that spring directly from the history of slavery. “What’s happening politically has deep roots in our political leaders’ investment in slavery and how they wielded that power for their own personal benefit,” she said. “People who don’t know that longer history can’t draw those connections.”
