Just came across this supremely weird story about photos that used to be taken of freshmen at Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. As recently as forty years ago, freshmen were told to strip naked and allow themselves to be photographed with metal pins affixed along their spines to indicate their posture. This was supposedly part of some now-debunked, Nazi-tinged scientific theory. Many of the photos were destroyed, but the surviving ones (27,000 of them) are now in a restricted archive at the Smithsonian. Many now-prominent people were photographed, including George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham, Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, Judith Martin, Bob Woodward, and Nora Ephron.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 11:42 am and is filed under Bits, News and politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.