Somewhere in the long argument about how knowledge should look, a scientist objected to a drawing. JSTOR Daily returns to that quarrel this week: botanical illustrations helped carry science to new audiences, and not every scientist welcomed the change. The objection was not that the pictures lied. It was that they persuaded — that an image could walk a reader past the reasoning and deliver them, already convinced, at the conclusion.
That suspicion is older than photography, and it has not aged out. Look across this week's literary and cultural news and you find the same question asked five different ways: when we want to know what happened, do we want to see it, or do we want to read it?
Smithsonian reports on thousands of intimate photographs of the Romanovs — the everyday life of Russia's last imperial family, whose execution the Bolsheviks carried out 108 years ago. The pictures are extraordinary precisely because they are ordinary. They open a portal, as the piece has it, into the royals' private world: the one the official record was never built to show.