Jeanne-Claude’s Role
The article “California Dreamin’ ” [June 2010] erred in omitting artist Jeanne-Claude’s essential role in the creation of the artwork Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76. She was an equal partner with her husband, Christo, in creating the dazzling public artworks for which the couple is justly world-renowned. Jeanne-Claude’s role is commemorated in the title of our current exhibition, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence.” She was deeply involved with all aspects of our exhibition before her death on November 18, 2009. The exhibition, catalog and a new documentary film commissioned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum are dedicated to her memory.
Elizabeth Broun
Margaret and Terry Stent Director
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Washington, D.C.
Today’s Prohibition
Daniel Okrent’s account of alcohol prohibition [“The Man Who Turned Off the Taps,” May 2010] is very instructive and relevant to our current marijuana prohibition and the failed war on drugs. The nation realized the idiocy of alcohol prohibition after 13 years and repealed the constitutional amendment, but the idiocy of the present prohibition on marijuana has persisted for decades. This policy has resulted in marijuana arrests totaling at least half of all drug arrests and thousands of people being incarcerated for “nonviolent” drug crimes. Hundreds of people have been killed in Mexican cartels’ drug-related violence. The United States must come to its senses: legalize, tax and regulate marijuana. The revenue could be used to treat people who have serious substance abuse problems with drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
Edwin L. Stickney, M.D.
Billings, Montana
Correction:
The photograph of a New York City speakeasy [“The Man Who Turned Off the Taps”] was taken in 1933 by Margaret Bourke-White when she worked for Fortune magazine, not Life, as stated in the caption.
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Comments (2)
Dear Sir:
In the otherwise excellent article on "The Genius of Small Things" (July/August 2010), Michael Rosenwald makes the erroneous statement: "To see something only one nanometer in diameter was impossible until 1981 when two IBM scientists invented the first scanning tunneling microscope...".
Erwin Müller at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin invented the technique known as field ion microscopy (FIM) in the early 1950s, which easily demonstrated nanometer-level resolution. In fact, FIM first imaged atoms (requiring a resolving power well below the nanometer level) in August, 1955. FIM was later was improved to the point where single atoms could not only be imaged but also identified (the atom probe).
Even before Müller's success, the transmission electron microscope invented by Ernst Ruska (also in Berlin) in 1932 was capable of resolving nanometer-scale features inside thin films. The scanning electron microscope, invented by Charles Oatley in Cambridge, England starting in 1948 (but building on work by Knoll in Germany in 1935) was also capable of nanometer-scale surface resolution, well before 1981.
The principal advantage of scanning-probe techniques such as the tunneling microscope described by Rosenwald is the wide variety of specimens that can be observed with minimal preparation. Like the scanning electron microscope, probe microscopies are limited to surface studies.
Sincerely,
David B. Williams
The University of Alabama in Huntsville
Posted by David B Williams on August 31,2010 | 11:18 PM
On historic choices, page 12:
I find it inappropriate to publish the glowing comment about President Obama.
With a approval rating of under 50%, many find his agenda ruinous to this country.
His election may have been historic, but the comment does not belong in your historic choices column. To me it is both inappropriate and a political message.
Posted by Bill Schick on July 3,2010 | 06:48 PM