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Miscellaneous
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Simon Kuper’s Soccer Men
A link to my review of journalist Simon Kuper’s book Soccer Men.
Bright Colors in the News
The use of bright colors has entered the news in two unexpected ways this week, and is accompanied by fascinating photographic evidence.
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Pied La Biche
This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my [...]
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“Beyond Critical Thinking”
“The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to ‘trouble’ ideas.” So says Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, whose reviews and essays I always make a point to read when I come across them.
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Judt and Ebert
Many people have commented upon Tony Judt’s eloquent and acutely observant description of the “progressive imprisonment without parole” that is life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he suffers. The first of a series of short essays, on the subject of getting through the night, is in the January 14 issue of the NYRB. Judt [...]
David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, The Heart of Power
I’ve just finished David Blumenthal and James A. Morone’s The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (University of California Press), which discusses eleven presidents’ encounters with illness alongside their attempts to influence health care policy. Blumenthal, professor of medicine and health policy at Harvard Medical School and an adviser to Barack [...]
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Letters of Note
Those who remember with some fondness Today in Letters, the blog I published briefly in 2007, will appreciate Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. The author describes it as a “blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives.” Since I began following the site a few weeks ago, [...]
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Fall 2009 New York Events Calendar
The new season is upon us. Each August I spend some time compiling a large list of art and academic events in and around New York City, which I use and share with a few others. After sending my autumn calendar to some friends I realized that some readers of this site might enjoy it [...]
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Eli Thorkelson/Decasia
Just came across the blog decasia: critique of academic culture, which is run by Eli Thorkelson, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. His subject? The anthropology of universities. There are many fascinating posts about higher education: “Against the concept of academic politics“; “Reading as an ethnographic tactic“; “The failed fantasy [...]
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Most Wanted
On August 3 the writer Luc Sante updated his blog for the first time since the beginning of the year. The post offers the story of a talkative retired cop he met one night in the 1980s at Farrell’s bar, in Brooklyn. It’s a little gem of a tale that involves Andy Warhol in unexpected [...]
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The Memory Palace
Although word about The Memory Palace has made its way around the web in recent months, I only discovered radio journalist Nate DiMeo’s new podcast over the weekend. Each three-to-six-minute episode contains an historical anecdote. DiMeo doesn’t interview historians, doesn’t cite his sources in the stories, and keeps the production values simple. (He hopes “The [...]
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New Design Observer Site; Change Observer Launches
For those of you who check Design Observer on occasion, now would be a good time to do so: The site has just re-launched with a new design and additional content, including Change Observer and Places. The former is a blog that “looks at social innovation through the lens of design,” and includes an essay [...]
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Today’s Prize for Best Unnecessary Journalistic Detail
Randy Kennedy wins the prize for best unnecessary journalistic detail in today’s Times. In a story about the Wassaic Project, an art gallery housed in a converted grain silo and run by a handful of young artists (one of whom I met at a birthday party in Providence in May), he gathers a quote from [...]
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Jack Hitt
After reading the entertaining interview with journalist Jack Hitt posted earlier this month to The Atlantic‘s Ideas blog (part 1, part 2), I was eager to see his byline. My first subsequent encounter with his writing did not disappoint: In yesterday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, Hitt investigates how “a Serbian war criminal [...]
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“The Architecture of Search”
Tom Vanderbilt explores the internet cloud: “As data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society … the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources. All of which is bringing [...]
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Futures for the Shopping Mall
Design writer Allison Arieff reports on her jury service for an architectural competition at the International Council on Shopping Centers, highlighting three innovative projects. Meanwhile, Matthew Shaer visits Belmar, a new mixed-use development on the site of a former mall in Lakewood, Colorado. For related reading, see my review of Helen Klodawsky’s 2008 film Malls [...]
Three snapshots from Iceland
Fifteen months after I visited Iceland, the country’s economy crashed in spectacular fashion, and the autopsy reports now being published suggest that I may also have been experiencing one side effect of an enormous bubble [...]
Obituaries
Several weeks ago Leonard Lopate interviewed on his radio program two obituary writers whose stories of the useful pressures of deadlines, necessitating last-minute scrounging in the library or on the phone (in search of evocative details), were quite charming. Now I’ve found an obit worth sharing [...]
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Administrative note: Today in Letters
I have imported the archives of Today in Letters to this weblog, where they can now be found in their own category. [...]
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Stuff Found Inside Sharks
From the archive blog of The Times (of London), “ten freaky finds inside of shark stomachs,” including a “great story from 1922 about a giant turtle which, amazingly, survived being swallowed and was rescued and taken to the New York Aquarium where, ‘recovering from cuts and shock,’ he was christened Jonah.” (Link via Light Reading.)
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Daily Routines
Daily Routines is a blog that explains “how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.” Its “Best Of” category includes Benjamin Franklin, Haruki Murakami, Karl Marx, and Willem de Kooning.
The earliest telephone numbers in New York; area codes
The answer to one question in this week’s “FYI” column, in the Times‘s city section, is totally fascinating. Here is the question and response: Q: Given the ubiquitousness of cellphones, it’s easy to forget that telephones are historical artifacts, but I’ve often wondered: What is the oldest telephone number still in use in New York? A: Here’s an [...]
Rules for Harvard Freshmen, 1741
The blog Boston 1775 has posted Harvard’s rules for incoming class of 1741. In the 1700s, ordinary schooling for Boston boys ran from about age seven to age thirteen or fourteen, if they lasted through the whole course. Therefore, the few boys who went on to college were still truly boys, only in their early [...]
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Platform for Pedagogy
Platform for Pedagogy is a weekly e-mail newsletter listing an interdisciplinary mix of lectures in New York City. According to its website: “Platform for Pedagogy is an initiative to advance a culture of cross-disciplinary public lecture attendance and to develop the lecture as practice. We deal exclusively with public lectures.” For two years I have maintained [...]
“Criticism and the Arts” panel (a longish report)
Given past experience with panel discussions, and common assumptions one brings to them, I didn’t have the highest hopes for one titled “Criticism and the Arts,” held last night at Hunter College. It featured Joan Acocella (of the New Yorker, Greil Marcus (author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the [...]
A considered response to my talk
One attendee of my talk yesterday offered a lengthy consideration of what I said. Among other points was this, which I feel is worth sharing and which he kindly allowed me to post: You suggested “one should live by the creed of verbs”, and even that “doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in [...]
Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl discuss inflicting “deep damage”
The Beiderbecke Affair has posted an excerpt of a conversation between The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier and Jed Perl, held earlier this year at the 92nd St. Y and reprinted in Columbia Magazine. Here is the first part of that excerpt: Leon Wieseltier: I think that if a critic discovers a book or a show [...]
DIY Art Project #2
1) Determine the dates of the four major art fairs—the Armory Show, Art Basel, Frieze, and Art Basel Miami Beach—in a given year. 2) Determine the dates exactly opposite those of the fairs. 3) Go to the “right place at the wrong time”—Basel in the winter, London in the spring, Miami in the summer, and [...]
“Utopia Station” at Princeton, Pamela M. Lee on the World Social Forum, and Slavoj Zizek in the LRB
On Thursday, March 30, I ventured down to Princeton’s campus for the latter half of “Utopia Station,” a two-day seminar devoted to the concept of free speech. As the press release had it: “We meet to examine this question and to move it.” I was interested in how this program of “talks, screenings, messages and [...]
DIY Art Project #1
In the spirit of Rob Pruitt’s 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself and e-flux’s DO iT: 1) Find a company that produces stickers. 2) Re-create the circle-and-arrow “You Are Here” design from New York City subway system maps located on train platforms. Change wording to “Others Are Here.” 3) Send to company for printing. [...]
Harmonic Convergence
If you widely read enough, connections start popping up in the unlikeliest of places. To wit, a quote from this article in Slate: Shrimp is, in fact, the most-consumed seafood in the United States. According to the National Fisheries Institute, the average American ate 4.2 pounds of the curved critters in 2004, up from to [...]
