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@ideasroadshow.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 8:12 AM

"The fundamental power of art lies in its unmediated, universal resonance with all of us."

Read about Giotto, museums and the dangers of a fixation on abstract interpretation of artworks.

🗃️ #arthistory #skystorians #art #italy #giotto #museums

ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/art-unmedi...

@ijhs.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 8:11 AM

#skystorians 🗃️ #sporthistory
📍New article!

"Football and National Identity Through the Lens of the Uruguayan Interior Press: The 1930 World Cup" ⚽ 🇺🇾

by Evelise Amgarten Quitzau, Daniele Cristina Carqueijeiro de Medeiros

Check it out: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@writerpaula.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 6:12 AM

My favourite story in this collection is The Invisible Assassin, because it gave me the chance to not only to research the Orient Express but to have Holmes travel on it! You can read this and five more here "5 stars! Total enjoyment!" #hisfic #history #skystorians
mxpublishing.com/products/dig...

@writerpaula.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 6:11 AM

@footnotesinhistory.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 4:24 AM

#OTD in 1944, the anti-Japanese Remember Pearl Harbor League claims membership has risen to over 1,100 total. Within a week, the group has added more than 200 members to its ranks. Nevertheless, the group will face mounting opposition as the war draws to an end.
🗃 #skystorians

"Anti-Jap League's Membership Grows"
AUBURN. Oct. 11.- (AP)- Membership in the Remember Pearl Harbor League has passed 1,100, George Westbeau, secretary of the league, declared last night. Comdr. Melvyn H. McCoy of the Navy and Maj. Sam Grashio, Army Air Forces, both of whom escaped from a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, will speak at a league meeting Friday, he announced.
The league was organized to prevent return of Japanese to the Puyallup and White River Valleys.
The Seattle Times, October 11, 1944

@iduhouse.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 3:45 AM

🌐 Artist of the Day: Refik Anadol

Refik Anadol turns data into dreams. His immersive installations transform information into moving color and light, blending artificial intelligence with human emotion. His work asks what machines dream of.
refikanadol.com

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #Art #ArtSky

Refik Anadol stands with his arms folded against a softly blurred field of turquoise, blue and green light, wearing a black high-collared shirt and round glasses. The portrait is credited to Efsun Erkılıç and was used in press materials for Anadol’s 2025 in situ exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. That context matters: the exhibition, Living Architecture: Gehry, asked what happens when the formal memory of an architect becomes material for a machine.
For the project, Anadol’s studio built a Large Architecture Model from an extensive archive of open-access images, sketches, plans and other records connected to Frank Gehry’s work. The result was not a digital imitation of Gehry, but a sequence moving from archive to data plotting, latent space and “machine hallucination,” using AI to generate new architectural possibilities in real time. It extended a question that has shaped Anadol’s practice for years: can data become pigment, and can a building become a responsive canvas rather than a fixed object? That 2025 project closed a loop in Anadol’s relationship with Gehry: in 2018, WDCH Dreams transformed 100 years of Los Angeles Philharmonic archives into machine-generated projections across Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, turning an architectural icon into a surface for memory.
The portrait also captures Anadol just before another major shift in scale. In June 2026, he and Erkılıç opened DATALAND at The Grand LA, the Frank Gehry-designed complex across from Walt Disney Concert Hall. Conceived as a museum devoted to AI arts, it turns the ideas behind works like Living Architecture into an institution: galleries where data, computation, scent, sound and human presence continually reshape the experience. The calm studio portrait therefore sits beside a much larger ambition. Anadol is not only making images with AI; he is building spaces, systems and institutions around the question of how humans and machine intelligence might create together.

At night in Las Vegas, the enormous Sphere glows like a planet against a black sky. Across its curved LED skin, green, blue, white and gold forms spread like coral, mineral deposits or microscopic life, making the building appear less like architecture than a living organism. The image shows Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations: Sphere, which debuted on the Sphere’s Exosphere on September 1, 2023.
The work was among Anadol’s most dramatic expansions of his idea of “AI Data Sculpture.” Rather than placing a moving image inside a rectangular screen, he treated the building itself as the medium. The Exosphere is roughly 366 feet high and 516 feet wide; Anadol’s 16-minute work uses its monumental surface for three chapters generated from vast image archives related to space and nature. His studio trained a dedicated AI model on subsets of those archives so that the system could generate new colors, forms and visual relationships from learned data rather than replaying a fixed photograph. The project also crystallized Anadol’s idea that architecture need not merely display digital art; its skin can become the artwork’s physical body, with scale, curvature and public visibility shaping what the data means.
Machine Hallucinations had been developing since Anadol’s 2016 residency with Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program, where he began asking whether a machine that can learn might also “dream” or “hallucinate.” At Sphere, that research became civic-scale spectacle. A private computational process was projected into public space at the size of a landmark.
Seen now, the work is also a bridge in Anadol’s evolution. The nature-like textures foreshadow the ecological focus that became central to his Large Nature Model and, by 2026, DATALAND in Los Angeles. The Sphere image captures a moment when his machine dreams stopped behaving like pictures on walls and began behaving like environments large enough to alter a city’s visual identity.

A lone visitor stands in a dark former boiler room as enormous blue, green, yellow and white currents of light spill across walls, floor and tall black columns. The person is nearly swallowed by the moving field, making the architecture itself seem liquid. This is Machine Hallucination, Refik Anadol’s 2019 immersive installation for the opening of ARTECHOUSE NYC beneath Chelsea Market, his first large-scale New York exhibition to use artificial intelligence.
The work began with more than 100 million publicly available photographs of New York’s architecture and urban landscape. Anadol and his studio used machine-learning systems to organize and reinterpret that archive in a 1,025-dimensional latent space, then turned the results into a 30-minute experimental “cinema” presented at roughly 16K resolution with multichannel projection and 32-channel sound. Instead of showing recognizable landmarks one after another, the installation asked what the city’s accumulated visual memory might look like if processed by a machine.
That choice was central to Anadol’s emerging idea of the “machine hallucination.” The computer was not being asked to document New York faithfully. It was being used as a collaborator that could find patterns across a visual archive too large for one human to absorb, then transform those relationships into a new spatial experience. Viewers did not stand in front of the image; they stood inside the data.
The photograph is an important early chapter in the practice Anadol later expanded through MoMA’s Unsupervised, the Las Vegas Sphere, the Large Nature Model and DATALAND. It also shows how his methods have evolved. Machine Hallucination drew from massive public image collections of a human-built city; his current nature-focused work emphasizes permission-based ecological datasets and more explicit questions about provenance, sustainability and stewardship. The immersive language stayed. The ethics and subject of the archive kept growing.

@aaronm.bsky.social Oct 12, 2026, 1:22 AM

Only 18 #Manuscripts from the #Vatican this week www.wiglaf.org/vatican/2026...
Includes a Digesta Vetus, a book on Papal coinags, more Avvisi, some letters, History by Æ. S. Piccolomini, conclave notes and more
#MedievalSky #Skystorians

@footnotesinhistory.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 9:28 PM

This photograph (excuse the watermark) of Eugenie Sperling may have been taken around October 11, 1944. I haven't been able to find any photographs of Masao Kuroki but there were a handful taken of Eugenie. The couple divorced shortly after the war, as Eugenie remarried by 1950.
🗃 #skystorians

@mobhistory.substack.com Oct 11, 2026, 2:47 PM

Law enforcement agencies investigated a memo book found near the scene of the 1931 #Maranzano murder. It's unclear if they were satisfied with the results or if they just lost interest in the matter.

mobhistory.substack.com/p/about-that...

#NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

@mobhistory.substack.com Oct 11, 2026, 1:41 PM

#OTD (Oct 11)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.

#NiagaraFallsNY #Chicago #LasVegas #Cleveland #Milwaukee #Pittsburgh #Brooklyn #LasVegas #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

On this date, Oct 11...
• in 1905, Brooklyn butcher Gaetano Costa, who refused Black Hand demands, is fatally shot.
• in 1924, Vincenzo DiLeonardo of Brooklyn and Paul Palmeri of Niagara Falls NY return to the U.S. aboard the S.S. Conte Rosso after a trip to Italy.
• in 1926, Al Capone is believed responsible for the killing of Earl 'Hymie' Weiss on Chicago's North Side.
• in 1930, bootlegger Pasquale Dauria is killed and his associate Frank Italiano is wounded in a Brooklyn drive-by shooting.
• in 1935, the body of 'Little Frankie' Teitelbaum, apparently murdered with an ax, is found in a trunk under the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge.
• in 1950, Meyer Lansky testifies before the Kefauver Committee. An attorney and a doctor tell the Kefauver Committee that Willie Moretti of New Jersey is hospitalized and cannot make his scheduled appearance before the committee.
• in 1966, New York crime boss Joe Colombo and underworld colleagues 'Johnny Bath Beach' Oddo, Lawrence Gallo, Albert Gallo, Salvatore 'Sammy the Assassin' Peritore and Joseph 'the Minx' Livoti are indicted for criminal contempt.
• in 1972, former Chicago boss Paul 'the Waiter' Ricca dies.
• in 1980, western New York mobster Joseph DiCarlo, 80, dies.
• in 1983, Las Vegas casino skimming indictments are unsealed against 15 defendants, including underworld bosses in Chicago, Cleveland & Milwaukee.
• in 2016, Pittsburgh area racketeer & FBI informant Chucky Porter passes away.
Image of Earl Weiss.

@academic.oup.com Oct 11, 2026, 12:00 PM

George Washington helped shape a nation, but who shaped him?

Discover the world behind the man in "George Washington and His World." oxford.ly/4jKImjd

#USHistory | #Skystorians

George Washington and His World by Denver Brunsman explores him as enslaver, revolutionary and president; out now. OUP.

@www.joditaylorbooks.com Oct 11, 2026, 10:11 AM

Would you actually want to work at St Mary's? #JodiTaylorBooks #History #skystorians www.joditaylorbooks....

@writerpaula.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 8:31 AM

"The Ghazi Genie" challenges #SherlockHolmes to solve a mystery that’s puzzled Watson since his army days. 6 strange tales inspired by #history "5 out of 5 stars! Like finding an old friend safe and well!" #ebook #audio #skystorians
@mxpublishing.bsky.social mxpublishing.com/products/dig...

@writerpaula.bsky.social Oct 11, 2026, 8:28 AM

If you love #fiction based on #history and true-life crime stories, please take a look at my new #MysteryBooks "5 stars! A gripping and dark mystery, full of twists and secrets. A must read for all fans of the genre" #skystorians
#crimethrillerbooks #HistoricalFiction
www.amazon.com/World-Wolves...

@kefauver4prez.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 9:08 PM

Estes Kefauver: the working man's friend!

Here, he talks to a forklift driver while on the campaign trail in Iowa in 1956. Kefauver was a strong supporter of organized labor throughout his career, and blue-collar workers were a key part of his political base.

#skystorians #polisky #history

@footnotesinhistory.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 7:20 PM

#OTD in 1944, the Seattle Times reports that Pvt. Masao Kuroki and Eugenie Sperling were married yesterday. The ceremony was performed by an Army chaplain at Fort Lawton, where Kuroki is stationed. The couple's story has been syndicated to newspapers across the country.
🗃 #skystorians

"Miss Sperling Becomes Bride Of Pvt. Kuroki"
The former Eugenie Sperling, the 19-year-old white girl who was wooed and won by a young Japanese-American soldier and would let nothing stand in the way of their marriage, was Mrs. Masao G. Kuroki today.
Records disclosed that Miss Sperling and Private Kuroki, 24, were married yesterday afternoon by a chaplain at the Seattle Army post at which Kuroki is stationed.
The Seattle Times, October 10, 1944

Denied a parental blessing for the interracial union. Miss Sperling defied her mother and came to Seattle from Spokane to be married. Denied a waiver of the three-day prenuptial waiting period required in this state, the young couple waited until their marriage license became valid yesterday. Denied a pass from his post, Kuroki summoned his pretty fiancee there, and they were married.
Miss Sperling, who, being more than 18, did not require the approval of her parents to be married remarked somewhat bitterly before the ceremony: "I thought marriage was a private affair!" and added: "Sure, I'm happy."
The Seattle Times, October 10, 1944