3 readings
Utopias, Audited
Ideal societies, built, unbuilt or imagined, checked through who paid, who did the work and what it would have cost; accounts and engineering rather than literary history.
Utopias, Audited
Atlantis is Plato's story, and its ditch has dimensions. Run them: about 10 billion cubic meters of earth, some 59 times a 1913 tally for the Panama Canal.
Image credit
"Nemo Aronax Atlantis" by Alphonse de Neuville — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nemo_Aronax_Atlantis_(91182398).jpg — Public domain in the US (this edition published 1922) and in the EU (Neuville died 1885; the file's license tag gives 1897, likely the engraver; either date is past life+70); modified: cropped to 16:9 for the card and page, keeping the two figures and the columns; the falling lava above and the lower rocks removed
Image credit
"Panopticon" by Jeremy Bentham — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panopticon.jpg — Public domain in the US (published 1843) and in the EU (Bentham died 1832; any draftsman or engraver working by 1843 is past life+70); modified: cropped to 16:9 for the card and page, keeping the half plan; the elevation, section and scale bar above removed
Image credit
"Nathaniel Hawthorne by Brady, 1860-64" by Mathew Brady — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nathaniel_Hawthorne_by_Brady,_1860-64.jpg — Public domain in the US (made about 1860 to 1864, Brady died 1896, life+70) and in the EU (Brady died 1896, life+70); modified: cropped to 16:9 for the card and page, forehead to chin; the Commons file is already cropped and cleaned from the Library of Congress negative
