This week I finished:

Manufactured Landscapes, by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky: I hadn’t heard of Burtynsky before reading a review of an exhibit in Manhattan of decades of his photography, which included several images.

He creates images that are compositionally beautiful of scenes that are scary and horrific but resulting from our culture and lifestyles. They show mines, factories, dying landscapes and ecosystems, and apocalyptic scenes. I plan to go to the exhibit. I recommend looking at his images online, but since he takes wide format original photographs, I anticipate online images pale in comparison to the originals.

This video is the first of three of his work and how he works. I recommend his images and this movie. It’s beautiful and horrific. Still, as much as I value it, I see a lot of acquiescence, what I wrote about in my book about nobody being asleep at the wheel because there is no wheel. He shows a problem and presumably feels something like “I’m showing the world these problems. They should help wake up the people asleep at the wheel to act.”

Everyone wants someone else to act. Some has to act first and lead others to act.

Benjamin Franklin, by Ken Burns: After finishing biographies of Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Jefferson, and preparing to read about Madison, I stumbled on this two-episode four-hour documentary on Franklin.

The movie shows that Franklin was the most renowned and influential American before George Washington. He was the oldest and one of the most important figures in creating the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and in starting abolitionism. He didn’t free his slaves and held back on promoting abolitionism nor freedom or equality for slaves, but promoted these things.

I had heard about his being influenced by Native American politics, then influencing America politics, but this documentary showed that influence greater than I would have thought. This article, Franklin and the Iroquois Foundations of the Constitution, describes more, but the documentary featured this quote, which implies he doesn’t think much of the colonies’ politics (the context implies he’s not insulting the Six Nations, but belittling the colonies): “It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of Ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interests.“

The article I linked to gives the context to the quote and more. I recommend the documentary.

• ← This week’s selected media, July 20, 2025: Mein Kampf, Volume 1, because I love learning, even (especially!) from those I disagree with
• I love simple things, like this Gandhi statue →