There’s an upcoming show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Alexander Calder’s influence on sculpture (inset: Nathan Carter, Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station, 2007). Did you know that Calder once designed costumes for radio plays? Yes, I said costumes. Conjurer James Randi has spent 1 hour and 44 [...]
Above, one of Jane Mount’s paintings from her “ideal bookshelves” series, which is intimate yet light. Do you use Twitter? If so, congratulations. Your 140 characters are now part of the Library of Congress. That seems like less of an honor all of a sudden. At TPM, Mike LaBossiere asks whether cruelty requires the capacity [...]
Early one Saturday morning, when Frank Wilson was just a boy, he found a dead man outside of his home. The stranger had suffocated himself in his car. “The only thing I remember feeling was curiosity. It inspired no nightmares…” Want to read a book about the history of the Polonez, Dacia, Wartburg or Volga? [...]
In his ethics column at the Times, Randy Cohen meditates the death of screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who is famous for (a) “naming names” during the McCarthy era, and (b) writing the script of On the Waterfront. Here’s Cohen’s question: It is not easy to reconcile Schulberg’s disheartening testimony with his splendid work. Does rejecting the [...]
Michelle, myself and I: some advice for Barack Obama from the much-neglected Department of Pronouns. The Atlantic’s Barbara Wallraff and Joe Pickett of the American Heritage Dictionary are having a polite conversation about polite conversation. “It’s not about unrequited tragic love,” observes Sancho Panza of Engelbert Humperdinck’s operatic version of Hansel and Gretel, “it’s about [...]
David Bordwell defines the “cinephile,” a nocturnal species of which the professor has made an exhaustive study. The creature in question doesn’t just “love movies.” Heck no, The cinephile loves the idea of film. That means loving not only its accomplishments but its potential, its promise and prospects. It’s as if individual films, delectable and [...]
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