5,000+ Objects Coming to the International Spy Museum

Spy Museum board member H Keith Melton is kindly offering up some 5,000+ personally collected objects to the collection. Since the 1970s, Melton has been gathering all kinds of trickery and tools used by spies—from a piece of a spy plane to “the axe used to hack exiled Soviet communist Leon Trotsky to death and even a 13-foot-long spy submarine from World War II.” Unsurprisingly …

YuMi the Robot Conducts Tenor Andrea Bocelli

In a program titled “A breath of hope: from the Stradivarius to the robot,” YuMi the dual-armed robot made its debut as a conductor. Through the compositions of Verdi, YuMi directed none other than world-famous tenor Andrea Bocelli in singing “La Donna è Mobile,” the aria from “Rigoletto” as well as many other performers. YuMi is the invention of ABB—and he was built as a …

One Book, 100 Black Women Photographers

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn’s new book “Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora” represents a much-needed testament to the power of black women photographers. The first of its kind since Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s “Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers,” back in 1986, Barrayn’s compilation includes work from “100 female photographers of the African diaspora,” according to Quartz. Through funding from the Brooklyn Arts Council and a crowdfunding campaign, the …