Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald, Currants and Trends Through a Mythic Lens,

the podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. I had an impromptu visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York just a few weeks ago on my way back home from India.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and so the Met was predictably crowded.

Lots of umbrellas, lots of people wearing black, which is something you notice right away when

you've just been in brightly clad India.

So I made my way through the hallways of one of my favorite buildings in the world, jet-lagged

and kind of a sleep-deprived fog, which can be an interesting liminal way of looking at art.

Colors and shapes pop, things that shine have extra shine.

There's a painting in there by 18th century French artist Jean-Baptiste Grues.

It's called Aegeena visited by Jupiter.

It pictures a young naked nymph staring up at Jupiter or Zeus who's in the form of an eagle.

He's getting ready to carry her off, of course, which is what Zeus does with young naked nymphs.

To be honest, it's not a particularly exciting painting. The eagle looks a little too scrawny to carry off the nymph.

There's nothing about that eagle, in fact, that seems infused with the energy of the god of thunder and storms.

And the nymph looks like a million other depictions of pale, rubinesque, late Renaissance women staring up in that helpless, swoony, save me kind of way.

So the painting probably would be of very little interest at all,

except for a recent tweet by Bet Midler. Midler tweeted a photograph of three teenage girls

sitting on a bench in the museum, their backs turned to this painting, focused instead, of course,

on their smartphones. She added the caption, What's wrong with this picture? The interweb, predictably, erupted in reply. Some voiced

agreement for Midler, responding with a hundred variations of kids these days, the

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