We live in an era of food separatism. Among our factions are the locavores, the vegans, the raw foodists, and the sustainable agriculturists. We have grass-fed beef, grass-finished beef, organic produce, minimally treated produce, and people who swear by or disparage some or all of the four. We have theory after theory—scientific, political, personal—about what to eat and why. We have Top Chef and Iron Chef, and never the twain shall meet.
Tintinology is a neglected field of study in the United States, but something approaching a cottage industry in the rest of the world. More than seventy books have been written about the great Belgian Georges Remi, who died in 1983 and was better known by his pseudonym, Hergé. Yet despite this torrent of analysis about the creator of the strangely coiffed boy reporter Tintin; his little dog, Snowy; and Captain Haddock, the drunken sailor with a Tourette’s-like compulsion to shout insults, we still know surprisingly little about the cartoonist, who was famously reticent, granting only a handful of major interviews
What’s the (noncrass, noncommercial) point of collecting war essays? Vindication? That would presume an argument ever ends. Artifact? Histories do a better job. Voyeurism? No, the point has to be recontextualization. We compile and reexamine war essays to learn what an old crisis can say about a present one. Mark Danner, one of the finest war essayists working, offers something even rarer in Stripping Bare the Body, a collection that builds a critique of the American view of war through aggregation, connecting the horrors of the world that the essays seek to rectify.
Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War is an important book—though it’s not for everyone. If you want a painstaking critique of Noam Chomsky or of protestors who chanted “Imperialism!” when America attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan, it offers no end of material and thoughtful argument. But general readers will find its last third off-putting. Following the author’s own penchant for witty turns of phrases, allow me this slogan: “Part of the way with Bérubé!”
If you are reading this, you almost certainly live your life as the subject of a state. This state expects you to abide by its laws, pay its taxes, and contribute in one way or another to its military adventures. You may chafe at these demands, but you know there are limits to what you can do to escape them. You are not alone in this. As political scientist James C. Scott puts it, by the nineteenth century to most people “life outside the state came to seem hopelessly utopian.”
“The picture business can only exist,” observed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer mogul Irving Thalberg in a long letter to a fellow studio executive in 1933, “on the basis of real entertainment, glamour, good taste, and stars.” Thalberg adhered to that formula for much of his intense, frequently brilliant career as one of Hollywood’s most influential producers in the age of the studio system. By the time he penned these words—he was in his early thirties and beginning to fear that the assembly-line approach introduced at other big studios would forever compromise the kind of filmmaking he espoused—he had already helped launch the careers
It comes as a surprise that Joshua Clover, a poet who teaches critical theory at UC Davis, begins his new book about pop music with a sympathetic meditation on political philosopher Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, Fukuyama responded to the death rattles of Soviet Communism with the now-legendary essay “The End of History?” His question mark was disingenuous; Fukuyama was sure of it. Taking an intellectual victory lap on behalf of the emerging world order, he wrote, “We have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist.” That
When strolling in an old church or museum, it’s often tempting to sneak into a roped-off section or peek behind a closed door. What, after all, could be hiding from us? Perhaps nothing more than an old broom. For the past twenty-five years, Canadian photographer Robert Polidori has been going behind the scenes at the Palace of Versailles to document periods of restoration and change. The result, nearly five hundred photographs collected in three volumes, is a far more intimate and revealing scene than the curated period set tourists flock to year-round. As a stage for the modern era, Versailles
Pop artist Richard Hamilton once said of the work of Dieter Rams that it occupies “a place in my heart and consciousness that the Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s.” In thirty-five years as chief of design for German manufacturer Braun, Rams personally oversaw the development of more than five hundred products—primarily consumer electronics—that came to define the interior landscape of the late twentieth century. The black, stacked stereo console; the modular shelving system afloat on its slotted track; the unassuming electric razor (below) perfect to the hand: These were Rams’s gifts to modernity, imitated the world over, and by now
Sometimes you find books that are sharply reported, incisive, edifying—and that you wish you could just file away in a hermetically sealed memory hole. That’s the dilemma posed by Amos Kamil and Sean Elder’s Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26). I am not a particularly soft person—in fact, I am rather callous—but this chronicle of an awful, decades-long conspiracy to cover up massive trauma being inflicted on defenseless kids is all but begging me to tune it out. It’s like Andrea Dworkin doing a dramatic
At the end of my sister’s street in Cambridge, England, there’s a coffee shop called Hot Numbers. I go there every time I visit her, not just because the coffee is excellent, but also because of the treats they offer. Many of them are unavailable here in New York: flapjacks (not a pancake but a buttery, crumbly oat bar), Jaffa Cakes, and Bakewell tarts. Eating these delights is like traveling back in time for me. I spent a year of college studying in England, and when I wasn’t focused on W. B. Yeats or Philip Larkin, I was usually trying
The art historian Robert Farris Thompson taught us that African art is an “art of motion.” Kongo: Power and Majesty (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, $65) demonstrates that the most compelling objects of central African art are not static, timeless creations—as they may seem in museum displays—but urgent responses by a community under siege. This exhibition catalogue, spanning the late-fifteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, documents much of what remains of precolonial artworks from the Kongo kingdoms, many being gifts by African royalty to their European counterparts. Ivory horns called oliphants have delicate figures ascending a seemingly unending spiral; raffia
Elizabeth Taylor is as fabulous and as undead as ever. Just this month on Page Six the megastar yielded two fresh items of vintage gossip. On Turner Classic Movies, she sizzled away as Maggie the Cat. And in “Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn,” the Jewish Museum in New York kvells: Between wedding Mike Todd in 1957 and Eddie Fisher in 1959, Elizabeth converted and remained a lifelong Jew. It seems that every tribe is making a landgrab to claim Elizabeth (she hated being called “Liz”) as one of their own, and who wouldn’t want to identify with the legendary
IT’S HARD TO alight on a response to Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings. The topless models and cute, lollipop-sucking young girls can look frosted, almost airbrushed, our culture’s detritus incongruously rendered with virtuosic technique. When paint is handled like this, both old masters and trashy magazines seem to regain their vivid alienness. It’s as if Yuskavage has managed to put her brush precisely in the place where we can still be unsettled.
RONI HORN’S WORK urges us to see the unfamiliar in familiar materials and phenomena—the weather, for instance. She has described water as “just tumult everywhere endlessly, tumult modulating into another tumult all over and without end,” a notion she conveys particularly well in the 2000 photographic series “Some Thames,” which lingers over form-defying ripples and reflections of the river’s surface. She seeks to put viewers in a state of flux, too. Her Water, Selected, 2007, made up of cylinders filled with water collected from different glaciers in Iceland, not only points to the hazards of global warming but also calls
Earlier this year, I gave a speech in New York advocating female supremacy. At the end of it, I told the men in the audience to hand over all their cash to the women nearest to them. (My feeling is that this should be done on a global scale.) There wasn’t universal compliance, but some money did change hands. It was my first experience of activism, and boy, was it fun! So I can almost see how, once you get the bug, you can’t stop.
You have to hand it to Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon in Your Blood: That acute title calls up an entire juicy slice—slab?—of modernist antiquity. Emerging from London’s queer-Dickensian gutter like a pestilent hedgehog from an air-raid shelter (or sewer, his detractors said), Bacon saturated the starched fabric of English art with images of, in the words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Blood, Devastation, Death, War, and Horror.” (In other words: What’s not to love?) Say what you want about the man—crown him first runner-up to Picasso in the artistic Mr. Universe pageant of the twentieth century or call him a
Roger Angell is now ninety-five and pretty much the last staffer at the New Yorker to have been part of its golden age. He literally grew up with the magazine, his mother, Katharine White, being its first fiction editor and his stepfather, E. B. White, one of its defining writers. As a result, when Angell recalls his childhood and youth, he remembers New Yorker galleys piled around the house, the sound of typing from White’s study, and parties where you might chat with James Thurber.
In nineteenth-century Paris, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went by the pseudonym Nadar, took photographic portraits of everyone he knew. It’s quite a crowd: There are the illustrators Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré; the painters Eugène Delacroix and Jean-François Millet; the composers Hector Berlioz and Gioachino Rossini; and the writers Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Charles Baudelaire. The standard Nadar shot is a three-quarter view, lit naturally from the left and a little above, with a plain mid-toned background and a sitter in dark clothes. If that sounds dull, a parade of his best work is anything but. His portraits are stark
PILOTS CALL IT “spatial-D,” short for spatial disorientation—the dizziness and inability to determine where your body is in space when you’re deprived of a clear visual horizon. The phenomenon can send a pilot into a tailspin; viewers of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Seascapes won’t crash anywhere, but they will find themselves inhabiting a perplexing limbo where sea and sky meet uncertainly, their borders blurred, and the nature of each realm is thrown into question. Sugimoto has often chosen subjects that confound predictable responses: His images of glowing white cinema screens (achieved by capturing a whole film in a single exposure), a candle’s
