If you're looking for an antidote to doomscrolling, try The Last Museum — an online index of more than 5.8 million artworks … and counting.

• The money quote: "This is one of those projects that makes one marvel at the quantity of art humans have produced, and the easy access to information we have today that would have been unthinkable even 50 years ago," Melissa Kirsch writes in her weekly N.Y. Times newsletter, "The Good List."

🖼️ Zoom out: The site indexes public domain art from museums around the world, spanning roughly 5,000 years — from artifacts dating to 3000 B.C. to works created this year. Some examples:

• 315,813 works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including paintings, photographs, sculptures, armor and more.
• 29 works from Paintings in Hospitals, a U.K. charity that lends artwork to health care providers.

👀 The intrigue: You can browse by museum, artist or culture — but the really cool bit is the site's semantic search. Instead of searching by title, you can look up art by its subject matter or vibe.

• Search "motherhood," and you'll see works like French painter William Bouguereau's "Rest" — an oil painting of a young mother relaxing with her two children, with St. Peter's Basilica visible in the distance. That's part of the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection.
• A more abstract search term like "otherworldly" yields pages and pages of results, including American photographer Susan Middleton's "Day Octopus" — a color photo of an octopus showing off its alien-like patterns and textures. It's in the National Gallery of Art's collection.

Happy browsing!

Speaking of otherworldly ... Reader Matt Lasure of Saint Paul, Minn., shares a "Best National Park" submission:

• "One of my favorite pictures, showing the alien landscape of Badlands National Park [in South Dakota]. Taken on a family trip in July 2022."