From FT, this time it’s personal V.S. Naipaul’s prose is elegant and spare. One of the best writers living today, why does he allow his pettiness to get in the way? A review of A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. From Christianity Today, a review of In a Cardboard Belt! Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage by Joseph Epstein. From The Mises Institute, an essay on The Great Capitalist Novel. A review of Heroes: The Champions of Our Literary Imagination by Bruce Meyer. From Reason, an article on Robert Heinlein at 100: How the science fiction master created the template for our looser, hipper, more pluralist world. One-Hit Wonders: What’s a superhero worth these days, anyway? We may soon be able to scale vertical walls like Spider-man thanks to scientists. What other superhero characteristics are achievable for mere mortals?
From NYRB, the dreamlike paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch are as mystifying and enigmatic as those of any artist at work today, although his figurative scenes, carnivalesque in their rich, surprising colors and tricky shifts from the real to the fantastic, are also among the likeliest to grab the attention of twelve-year-olds. From Forward, an article on Pissarro’s Unquiet Pastoral. A review of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle. And God created the artist... or was it the other way around? Ever since the dawn of civilisation, artists have been in competition with the gods. The hand-made tale: In cultural terms, authenticity is all-important. But it has always been a tricky notion, a blurry concept even more complex in the contemporary art world. Culture, done right, can be a cash cow for cities: A review of The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid.
Inspiring modernity: Does Toronto have a fashion scene? Has the Canadian city once described as "New York run by the Swiss" and "Canada’s Big Apple" finally outclassed its American counterpart? The spread of the fashion bug: Fashion and infectious diseases have a lot in common. It’s the same bug, transmitted from New York to London to Milan to Paris, now spreading exponentially; and new notions of what is luxurious are not about brands or even money, but about experience, rarity and wonder: An excerpt from Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre by Dana Thomas (and more). The Big Brand Theory: More and more young designers are gambling on the mass market. But is it all risk and no profit? The Knockoff Won’t Be Knocked Off: With media coverage of fashion so broad and instantaneous, consumers have been conditioned to seek out the latest styles — and they expect more for less.
