This weird trick will help you summon an army of worms

In the middle of Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest, a bizarre, almost magical scene is
unraveling. Sliding a metal strip over a wooden stake, a master summoner is sending deep
croaking noises reverberating through the area. And, as if in a trance, hundreds of earthworms
begin emerging from the soil. This is worm grunting, also called worm charming or fiddling. It’s
a tradition that’s been practiced for more than a century, but its inner workings were a mystery
until only recently. Worms collectively undertaking an underground exodus seems especially
unbelievable when you consider how vulnerable this makes them. So why is surfacing worth the
risk? Over the years, people have proposed a number of imaginative hypotheses. One was that
worms were somehow charmed by the noise, like the rats from the medieval Pied Piper
legend. Okay, sounds fun, but how would the worms actually become bewitched? Another
hypothesis was that worm grunting tickled their bodies, so they emerged to end the
aggravation. Whimsical! But worm grunting vibrates the ground’s surface. If worms were
evading the vibrations, wouldn't they burrow deeper instead? Perhaps the most popular
hypothesis was that worm grunting mimicked falling rain and the worms fled to avoid
drowning. In 2008, biologist Kenneth Catania tested this hypothesis, setting up three arenas filled
with soil and 300 individuals of the large species of earthworm found in the Florida
Panhandle. After an hour of rain, water had pooled at the surface, but only two earthworms
emerged. The rest remained buried and healthy. So, unlike those containers, this hypothesis just
didn’t hold water. Catania decided to explore another route of inquiry. In 1881, Charles Darwin
published his final work, a bestseller that rivaled his most well-known books at the time: “The
Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their
Habits.” Yes, it was literally called that— and it was the culmination of 40 years of earthworm
investigations. Within it, Darwin noted that worms sometimes left their burrows when the
ground trembled and mentioned an interesting hypothesis: maybe they flee because they believe
they’re being pursued by moles. Catania got to work testing this hypothesis himself. He found
that Eastern moles had astounding tracking abilities, could eat their weight in worms every
day, and were abundant in the Florida Panhandle. When Catania released a single mole into
worm- and soil-filled arenas, about 30% of the worms crawled to the surface in the first hour— a
markedly different result from the control and rain trials. And when he recorded the vibrations
produced by worm grunters and moles digging, their frequencies overlapped substantially. This
was it. Over hundreds of thousands of years, these earthworms evolved a behavior that helped
them escape a top predator. Aboveground, they were immune to the moles, which usually stayed
subterranean. But then humans came along. And, funnily enough, we aren’t even the only
ones that take advantage of this behavior. Herring gulls and wood turtles also sometimes drum
their feet on the earth to summon worms. So then why does this behavior persist?Scientists think
it’s beneficial for a prey species to maintain its adaptations against a more frequent
predator, even if it makes it more vulnerable to a rarer one. Many insects, for example, use flight
to avoid predation. But painted redstarts take advantage of this: they boldly flash their colorful
tail and wing feathers to elicit this response, then catch the insects as they try to fly away. It
seems the prey species’ response remains simply because it’s beneficial most of the time. For
over a century, humans in the southern US, the UK, and elsewhere have been unknowingly
exploiting the worm’s escape response. The current world record for “most worms charmed” was
set by a 10-year-old British girl in 2009. Wiggling a fork in the ground and hitting it with a
stick, she made 567 worms surface in just 30 minutes. Charming, really.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC EMPIRE
In the 7th century CE, one man started a chain of events that would change the world order for good. The
prophet Muhammad united the people of the Arabian Peninsula through the formation of Islam. These
people included both nomadic Bedouin tribes and the inhabitants of oasis cities like Mecca and
Medina. Until Muhammad’s time, the region hadn’t been considered a serious match for the powerful
neighboring Persian and Byzantine empires. But the alliance Muhammad formed was political as well as
religious, an empire with Medina as its political heart and a force to be reckoned with. Muhammad was a
one-of-a-kind leader. He had been a member of the Quraysh, the tribe that controlled Mecca. After
Muhammad’s death, those close to him deliberated who should succeed him— a contentious
question. Abū Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, emerged victorious and became the new caliph, or
successor. Over the next 30 years, four caliphs, all from Muhammad's tribe, conquered vast areas beyond
Arabia, including their mighty neighbors, the Persians and the Byzantines. But as the empire expanded,
dissent within it grew and a civil war erupted. The fourth caliph, Ali, was assassinated. Afterwards, the
Umayyad Dynasty came to power. The Umayyads were from the same tribe as Muhammad, but from a
different, rival clan. They extended the empire’s reach from present-day Spain to India and made
Damascus their capital. But an empire this vast, full of many different peoples, was at risk of conflict and
fracture. The Umayyads stabilized it by replacing the ruling elite in conquered territories with Muslim
officials, while largely allowing the day-to-day customs of local populations— including their religious
preferences— to continue. Arabic was used as the administrative language, unifying political affairs
across the empire, but people continued to speak and write local languages, too. Still, many in the empire
were dissatisfied with Umayyad rule and questioned the dynasty's legitimacy. The Abbasid family
capitalized on these sentiments, promoting themselves as more direct descendants of the prophet, though
their actual relation to Muhammad was more tenuous than they claimed. They overthrew the Umayyad
caliphate in 750 CE, becoming the second great dynasty of the Islamic Empire. To establish themselves
as the new rulers, they relocated the capital once more, this time building a new city: Baghdad. Under
Abbasid rule, the elite enjoyed a lifestyle of luxury, thanks to extensive trade networks that brought both
products and people from all over the known world to Baghdad. Byzantine, Persian, Indian and Arab
cultures and knowledge intermingled, leading to artistic and scientific advancement. The caliph was
wealthy and powerful beyond imagination. But there was never a clear line of succession dictating who
would become the next caliph. Any male relative of the former caliph was eligible, so brothers, nephews,
and uncles fought to gain power. Within the court, army officers, wives, concubines, and government
officials all demanded their share of the treasury. Because the caliph depended on his entourage to stay in
power, each transition of rulership opened the doors for favoritism and corruption. Outside the
court, many questioned the legitimacy of the caliph, noting that the caliph’s religious duty to moral
excellence was at odds with the court’s decadent displays of wealth. In 1258 CE, the Mongols approached
Baghdad. They encountered little resistance as they thoroughly destroyed the city. Legend has it that they
rolled the caliph in a rug and had horses trample him to death, and that the Tigris River ran black from the
ink of the manuscripts that were thrown into it. The siege of Baghdad laid bare a longstanding reality: for
centuries, the caliphs had ruled mostly symbolically. Local leaders throughout the empire had grown
more powerful, and they refused to pay taxes, spending the money on their own courts instead. The time
of one united Islamic Empire was over, but its influence through written and spoken Arabic, Islam, and
the ideas of its greatest intellectuals, left a lasting mark on the world.
How to write less but say more
So I've got some tough medicine for you. The truth is that everybody in this room needs to radically
rethink how you communicate, especially how you write, if you want anything to stick in this distracted
digital world. I don't care if you're a student, if you're an academic, if you're a scientist, you're a CEO, a
manager. I'll tell you what the data told me that your friends won't tell you, which is almost nobody
listens to or reads most of what you write. Most of the stuff that you agonize thinking about, they pay no
attention to. And how do I know this? Well, I learned it the hard way. I've dedicated my entire life to
mass producing words. I was a journalist by training. Started at the "Oshkosh Northwestern." Worked my
way up to covering the presidency for "The Washington Post" and the "Wall Street Journal." And I started
two media companies, all about mass producing words. Politico and now Axios. And at my current
company, the entire premise of the company is to teach journalists and then CEOs, academics and
others how to use far fewer words. So why? Why, if I spent my entire life writing lots of words, do I want
people to use fewer of them? Because the data -- and you -- made me. If you actually look at what you're
doing -- One of the most interesting things about technology, one of the creepiest things about technology
is businesses know so much about you. What you do, where you go, what you buy. And in the case of a
media company, how you consume information. And the data about how you consume information is
eye-popping. And to be honest, for me, really humbling. And led to this journey about, wow, if I'm
looking at this data and the data basically says: you read almost nothing. You skim. You might look at a
headline. You might look at a subject line. But you're basically not reading the stories, in my case, that we
were producing. And the most humbling moment, the eye-opening, the aha moment for me: I was a
journalist, I was at Politico writing columns about President Obama. And we wrote this column, and I
looked at the traffic numbers and the White House had to respond to it. And boy, was I feeling cool and
smart ... until I looked at the data. So back then you had to paginate pages online. And so, you know, you
had to click from one page to the next to keep reading. And I looked at the data. This was a 1600-word
column that everyone in Washington was talking about, that had me feeling so confident. And I realized
almost nobody went past the first page. It gets worse. On one page, there's only 450 words. And I hid a lot
of the good stuff at the end. And so it turns out that people were responding, sharing, talking about a story
that almost nobody read. And so it put me on sort of this journey, this discovery. I'm like, really, like,
nobody reads anything? Is this true everywhere, is it just me, is there something about my writing? So I
called my friends at the "New York Times." I called our friends at Facebook. I started to talk to
academics and try to figure out, well, what's going on here. Because I had a choice at this point. I could
give up on all of you. I could give up on humanity. I could give up on my career. Or I could do what
basically Jeff Bezos would do if he's trying to sell you a shoe or get you to buy a book. Which is, what is
the data telling us? What do you want? What are you doing? And that data was showing that
one, everybody was getting hit with more information than ever before and is perpetually distracted, all
because of the internet. You skim. You don't really read. And you share stuff without even bothering to
see what it actually means or what the story might say. And if you think about it, the deeper I dug, the
more it actually made sense. For people who are my age or older, like once upon a time, the iPhone didn't
exist. The Android didn't exist. There was no Facebook. There was no Google. If you wanted to learn
about something new, you had to go to an encyclopedia. You wanted to look up a word, you went to a
dictionary. If you were waiting for news, you had to wait for the evening news or the morning
newspaper. And then suddenly 2007, that period comes along, and now all of us had the opportunity to
have a smartphone with astonishing capabilities to give us access to more information than at any point of
humanity. Any idea we had, anything we didn't know, we could Google it. Any idea we had, no matter
how stupid it was, we could share it. And not only could we share it, we could find other people who
would applaud, who would follow us, who'd fan us. And suddenly, oh my gosh, like, we've got all this
access to mass information at scale. And you could do this for free. You could do this for free. So
suddenly we're getting hit with all this information, and I don't think our species was built to keep up with
it. I talked to a guy at the University of Maryland who's studied students for the last decade, and he
basically found that even when you choose to read something, even when you make the choice that this is
important, you spend on average 26 seconds looking at it. Review.org and others have looked at how
many times do you look at your screen in a day. They found it's at least 250 times you're checking your
phone. And for those that don't think that's true, think about how many times you've either checked it or
thought about checking it since I started babbling. Our data shows that more often than not, if you share a
story on social media, you never read it. Think about that: like there’s something about a headline or a
photo that got you so jacked up that you're going to share it like you're a little lemming. And we all do it
because our brains are being, like, flooded with information. And what I thought when I did the
discovery, I thought, for sure the brain must be getting rewired. And you hear that often. There's very
little scientific proof that that's true. What happened and what we think is happening is, as a species,
we've always been prone to distraction. We think we're good multitaskers. Almost nobody is. We're good
at doing one thing if you're focused on it. The University of California, Irvine, studied this. They studied
our distractibility and found that if you get distracted on something, it takes you 20 minutes to truly
refocus. Now think about your day. It's just awash in distraction. Awash in words: tweeted words, texted
words, Slacked words, email words. Words, words, words. And then you peck at your little computer
looking for more. So no wonder nobody's paying attention to almost anything you're saying or doing. No
wonder it's so hard to get people to pay attention to anything. So at Axios, as we thought about this, we
said, listen, if the consumer’s saying they want more information quicker and they're not going to spend
that much time and you want to stay in journalism, what would you do? What would you do? And our
solution was what we call Smart Brevity, that people want smart content, essential content. But they want
it delivered efficiently, as fast as humanly possible. And we saw it in how people were getting our
information, how they were getting it elsewhere. And so we built a whole company around it to teach
journalists how to do it. And journalists kind of adapted right away. And suddenly we had awesome
readership almost overnight, people in the White House, CEOs, tech leaders. And then two interesting
things happened after that. I started to get not ten or 20, literally hundreds of notes from readers
saying, "Thank you, you're trying to save me time. I can tell." I never asked for a thank you, especially
when you cover politics, you're lucky not to get hit by a shoe, much less actually have someone thank you
for it. But I was like, "Oh, that is interesting." And then about a year and a half in, we started to get calls
from companies, from the NBA, from startups, and almost all were saying the same thing: "Hey, our
executives, our people, they're reading Smart Brevity, but they won't read anything that we do
internally. This led me on another journey to figure out why people can't get people to read about things
that are happening at their company or happening at their school or happening at their startup. And it
turned out that basically people were vomiting so many words in all these places that nobody was paying
attention to it. And that's where we thought, oh, Smart Brevity could work in almost any setting. So we
get a call from the CIA, the head of the CIA. They call us, and they say, "Listen, can you guys come in
and talk to our team about how spies can essentially give a much more crisper explanation of what they're
seeing on the ground? Like, what are the threats? They're not great communicators. These messages are
meandering." So my partner goes in, talks to the CIA, explains the tricks and tips I’m going to give you in
a second. And in the audience is a guy who writes the Presidential Daily Brief, and this was under Donald
Trump, and he would write it, go in, and they would brief him. And he was so enamored with this idea of
communicating more effectively that he quit and now works for us, teaching other people how to
communicate more effectively. I'm not blaming Trump. It's because of us, because of Axios. Around the
same time, Jamie Dimon, one of the most famous CEOs of our generation, he writes his annual letter. It's
32,000 words long, about his observations on banking and on the world. 32,000 words is basically a
book. So he's probably lucky if even his family members read it. So his staff calls us, and they say, "Hey,
listen. It seems like you guys are good at getting people to pay attention to information. Could you do a
Smart Brevity version of it?" So we took his most important points, turned 32,000 words into a couple
hundred, and voila, they got much more engagement, much more traction in people seeing what's
important, remembering what's important. So what I want to leave you with are what are some of the
basic tips. Because you probably know, you're frazzled, you're distracted, you can see it. When you're
trying to send a message, what are the things that you could do differently, starting today, to become a
vastly more effective communicator? Number one, stop being selfish. Stop being selfish. What do I mean
by that? So much of writing is self-indulgent. We write about what we care about, and we write at the
length that we want to write about. We don't think about the whole purpose of it, which is what is the
person that I'm writing this for, or talking to, what do they actually need to know? What do they actually
care about? Reverse the way you think about communicating. At our company, the first two words of our
manifesto are: "Audience first." How do you serve the people that you're trying to reach? The Holy Father
himself has blessed this concept indirectly. So Pope Francis just gave a speech recently in Slovakia,
where he was talking to priests about the homilies that they're giving. And he said, “You have to stop
giving 30 and 40 minute homilies, and they should be 10 minutes. Because no one’s listening to
you. You’re losing them. People don’t pay attention that long.” And he joked when he made the
announcement that the loudest applause came from the nuns because, in his words, they're the ones who
have to suffer through your long-windedness. So point two is: grab me. Whenever you're communicating
-- again, I don't care if it's in an email, if it's a tweet, if it's a note, if it's a memo to a friend, grab me. What
is the most important thing, the reason you're writing? What is that one thing, if you only had that 26
seconds I mentioned, what is the one thing you want me to remember about it? Which is related to tip
three, which is: just keep it simple. Keep it simple. Like think of that one sentence, one sentence is better
than two sentences. One paragraph is better than two paragraphs. Use simple, strong words. There's a
reason you're taught a simple sentence structure when you're a little kid. It still works effectively today. It
still works effectively. Keep it simple. If you're going to write about a banana, you're not going to call it
an elongated yellow piece of fruit. You're going to call it a banana. If you're going to talk about someone
lying, you're not going to say prevaricate, you're going to say lie. Keep it simple. Which relates as well to
point four, which is: be human. Write like a human. I see this in journalism all the time. I don't understand
what happened to our species that when you put a pen in our hand or a keyboard in front of us, we
suddenly stiffen up, think we're a Harvard professor or we're Walt Whitman, and we try to show off in
our writing. Like, if I was talking to you in the bar, I'm not going to use SAT words, I'm not going to talk
in acronyms. I'm not going to use wordy clauses. I'm going to talk like I'm talking to you now. I'm going
to talk like a human. So stop, stop using those big terms. You think that people think you're smart when
you use them? They don't. They just want to throw a shoe at you. Which leads me to point five, which is
just stop. Just stop. The greatest gift that you can give yourself and others in this cluttered world is their
time back and is your time back. Use as few words, as few sentences as humanly possible so that that
person gets the message you want and you both get the time back that you deserve. And I can tell you
this, I've seen it in my own life. If you just start to think about the efficiency of communication, if you put
into practice a couple of the tips that I just talked about, you will see in your own mind that you start to
think more clearly, talk more clearly, write more clearly. And you'll see ultimately that it's selfishly good
for you because you'll be heard again.

What's the best country to live in?

What’s the best country in the world to live in? Is it the one with the best food? The longest life
expectancy? The best weather? For the past 70 years, most governments have relied heavily on a single
number to answer that question. This number influences elections, the stock market, and government
policy. But it was never intended for its current purpose; and some would argue that the world is addicted
to making it grow... forever. This number is called the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, and it was
invented by the economist Simon Kuznets in the 1930s, to try and gauge the size of an economy in a
single, easy to understand number. GDP is the total monetary value of everything a country produces and
sells on the market. To this day, GDP per capita, which is just the total GDP divided by the number of
people living in that country, is widely seen as a measure of well-being. But GDP doesn’t actually say
anything direct about well-being, because it doesn't take into account what a country produces or who has
access to it. A million dollars of weapons contributes the exact same amount to a country’s GDP as a
million dollars of vaccines or food. The value society derives from things like public school or
firefighters isn’t counted in GDP at all, because those services aren’t sold on the market. And if a country
has a lot of wealth, but most of it is controlled by relatively few people, GDP per capita gives a distorted
picture of how much money a typical person has. Despite all that, for a long time, higher GDP did
correlate closely to a higher quality of life for people in many countries. From 1945 to 1970, as GDP
doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in some western economies, people’s wages often grew
proportionally. By the 1980s, this changed. Countries continued to grow richer, but wages stopped
keeping pace with GDP growth, or in some cases, even declined, and most of the benefits went to an
ever-smaller percentage of the population. Still, the idea of capturing a nation’s well-being in a single
number had powerful appeal. In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan came up with the idea of
Gross National Happiness as an alternative to Gross Domestic Product. Gross National Happiness is a
metric that factors in matters like health, education, strong communities, and living standards, having
citizens answer questions like, “How happy do you think your family members are at the
moment?” “What is your knowledge of names of plants and wild animals in your area?” and “What type
of day was yesterday?” The United Nations’ Human Development Index is a more widely used metric; it
takes into account health and education, as well as income per capita to estimate overall well-being.
Meanwhile, a metric called the Sustainable Development Index factors in both well-being and the
environmental burdens of economic growth, again, boiling all this down to a single number. Though no
country has been able to meet the basic needs of its people while also using resources fully
sustainably, Costa Rica currently comes the closest. Over the past few decades, it’s managed to grow its
economy and improve living standards substantially without drastically increasing its emissions. Other
countries, like Colombia and Jordan, have made notable progress. Costa Rica now has better well-being
outcomes like life expectancy than some of the world’s richest countries. Ultimately, there are limits to
any approach that boils the quality of life in a country down to a single number. Increasingly, experts
favor a dashboard approach that lays out all the factors a single number obscures. This approach makes
even more sense given that people have different priorities, and the answer to which country is best to live
in depends on who’s asking the question. So what if that were you designing your countries well-being
metric? What do you value, and what would you measure?

A brief history of Spanish

Beginning in the 3rd century, before the coming era, the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula. This
period gave rise to several regional languages in the area that's now Spain, including Castilian, Catalan
and Galician. One of these would become Spanish— but not for another 1,500 years. Those years tell the
origin story of what’s become a global modern language. During the Roman occupation, colloquial
spoken Latin, often called “Vulgar Latin,” mixed with Indigenous languages. Approximately 75% of
modern Spanish comes from Latin, including syntactic rules. For instance, verbs are conjugated in a
similar way as in Latin. And like other Roman languages, nouns have gender: el sol, the sun, is
masculine, whereas la luna, the moon, is feminine. After the Roman Empire collapsed, a series of other
powers conquered the region. First came the Visigoths starting in the 5th century of the common
era. They spoke an eastern Germanic language that would eventually become part of German and lent a
few words to the language that would become Spanish. Then the Umayyad Caliphate ousted the
Visigoths. They spoke Arabic, which left a strong mark on modern Spanish: over a thousand words come
from Arabic. These often have a starting “a” or “z” sound, and sometimes include an “h.” In 1492, the
Catholic Church consolidated its power through two monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, expelling
Muslims and Jews, combining the distinct regional kingdoms into one nation, and adopting one of the
local languages as the official state language. That language was Castellano, or Castilian, from the
Kingdom of Castile, which was centrally located in Spain and home to Madrid. Thereafter Castellano
became Español, or Spanish. But the Spanish of 1492 was Old Spanish, very different from Spanish
today. That same year, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, marking the start of the
Spanish conquest of the Americas. The Indigenous population of the Americas spoke an estimated 2,000
different languages. Over the next few decades, most of them were forced to adopt Spanish at the expense
of their own languages. Still, words from Indigenous languages became part of Spanish. From Nahuatl,
the language of the Aztec Empire, came words with “ch” and “y” like “chapulin” and “coyote.” From
Quechua, a language spoken in the Peruvian Andes, came words with “ch” like “cancha,” “chullo,” and
“poncho.” Some of these words describe things that hadn’t existed in the Spanish lexicon before, while
others replaced existing Spanish words even in Spain. By the time Miguel de Cervantes published the first
part of “Don Quixote” in 1605, the language was arguably more similar to modern Spanish than plays of
one of his contemporaries, William Shakespeare, were to modern English. Starting in the 18th
century, French language and culture were extremely fashionable in Spain, and later Hispanic
America. While the two languages already had commonalities from their shared roots in Latin, Spanish
gained new words from French during this period. In the 19th century, all over Central and South
America, people revolted to gain independence from Spain. In the newly sovereign nations, people
continued to speak the language of their former oppressors. Today, there are approximately 415 million
inhabitants of Hispanic America. Spanish is the official language of 21 countries and Puerto Rico. As of
2021, only English, Mandarin, and Hindi have more speakers. How does a language with so many
speakers around the world not break apart into new languages the way Vulgar Latin did? There's no easy
answer to this question. Other languages that spread through colonialism, like French, have mixed with
Indigenous languages to form entirely new ones. Some would argue that Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish
and English, is a distinct language or on its way to becoming one. But although a person in Buenos Aires
occasionally might use words that aren’t fully intelligible to someone in Bogotá or Mexico City, Spanish
retains enough unity of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary to remain one language.

Can you guess what's wrong with these paintings?

These paintings are in peril. All three have been defaced, some in ways that are almost impossible to see
with the naked eye. Can you guess how they've been altered? You might be surprised. When a museum
curator inspected this portrait, attributed to the 16th century Italian painter Bronzino, they suspected it
was a modern fake. However, closely examining the cracks on its surface, an art conservator discovered
that it was from that era— It had just undergone drastic changes in recent centuries. Using x-ray
technology, they peered under the outer surface of paint and saw the countenance of a completely
different woman. Essential parts of the painting had been modified during a 19th century restoration.
Prior to the mid-20th century, art restorers took a more heavy-handed approach, often believing they were
improving art. Nowadays, they focus on keeping the original work intact with minimal
intervention. When they need to fix something up, they usually make their markings visually and
chemically distinct from the original, so they can be harmlessly removed. But the work of past restorers is
a threat they regularly contend with— as was the case with this portrait. To recover the original, the
conservator began removing the outer varnish coat. Varnish is commonly used to protect paintings from
debris and make their colors pop. But the natural varnishes past restorers applied eventually
darkened, which is what gives older paintings that aged, yellowy look. Slowly dissolving the varnish, the
conservator uncovered crisp colors below. Taking small samples from the added and original paint
layers, they analyzed the compositions of each. Then, they decided which solvents could dissolve the
overpainting while minimally affecting the original. Carefully dabbing the canvas with them, they
removed the overpainting’s dainty hands and idealized face. The true painting underneath revealed
Isabella of the Italian Medici dynasty. The portrait isn’t Bronzino’s, but it is from around 1570, and may
have been painted by one of his students. Its Victorian makeover was likely done to boost sales because
the original subject wasn’t considered attractive. But now, Isabella is back, meeting her viewer’s gaze
directly. This painting, “An Allegory with Venus and Cupid,” is actually Bronzino’s, and it was
completed around 1545. It centers on a kiss between Venus and her son Cupid– but it’s been subtly
altered. When London’s National Gallery acquired it in 1860, the Gallery’s director deemed it too risqué
for Victorian England. So, he commissioned a restorer to obscure Venus’s tongue and nipple. A century
after this modification, art conservators analyzed and removed the overpainting with select solvents. In
the process, they also realized that the veil covering Venus’s crotch and the branch hiding Cupid’s
posterior were other add-ons. Removing two layers of censorship from the painting, it was finally free to
boast its provocative original details. This massive painting called “The Night Watch” was completed by
Rembrandt in 1642. Since then, it’s endured one dramatic amputation, two stabbings, an acid attack, and
centuries of grime. A museum guard immediately neutralized the acid with water. Restorers lifted the
grime, revealing that the painting was not set at night, and healed the slashes using adhesive and extra
canvas backing. But they faced an even trickier problem. In 1715, strips were removed from all sides of
the canvas, including two whole feet from the left, to fit it inside Amsterdam’s Town Hall. They've been
lost ever since. But a multi-year conservation project that began in 2019 replaced the missing
pieces. They managed this by training an artificial intelligence to digitally paint in Rembrandt’s
style. Then, using another artist’s rendering of the original, the program recreated and printed the
painting’s lost sections. Finally, the team returned “The Night Watch” to its full size, with AI-generated
best guesses to fill in the blanks. All of these paintings had been altered, but none of them were
irrevocably ruined. With painstaking scientific analysis and technical skill, art conservators immortalize
priceless artifacts. They counteract sudden damage and creeping threats— and sometimes, they perform
near miracles. This video was made possible with support from Marriott Hotels. With over 590 hotels and
resorts across the globe, Marriott Hotels celebrates the curiosity that propels us to travel. Check out some
of the exciting ways TED-Ed and Marriott are working together and book your next journey at Marriott
Hotels.