• print • Dec/Jan 2011

    The Golden Bowl

    'Tis the season, and I suspect there is no one on earth capable of embracing it more festively than David Wondrich. His first book about cocktails, Imbibe! (2007), is a rousing call to the bar in the form of the life and times of pioneering nineteenth-century bartender—and author of The Bartender’s Guide—Jerry Thomas, recipes included. To it he now adds the wildly entertaining and fantastically instructive Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (Perigee, $24). Who knew that a book about the history of a drink that is, after all, just “a simple combination of distilled spirits,

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Domestic Disturbances

    For a certain swath of American female thirty-somethings, the literary thriller comes with an odd set of associations. In addition to the windswept heaths of Wuthering Heights and Manderley, such books will likely conjure the pine-lined hiking trails of New Mexico, the fiercely policed social boundaries of classrooms and high school cafeterias, and beachy redoubts where teenagers would do well to avoid slippery black rocks.

    As for the cast of characters, these readers won’t tarry with either hockey-masked predators or moody Heathcliffs with a past. Instead, they will knowingly recognize boys

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Holiday Escapism

    Almost every catalogue has a gimmick. The oddball prose and hand illustrations of J. Peterman. The sub–Ryan McGinley photography and adolescent moodiness of Urban Outfitters. The saddle-stitched punch line that is International Male. Effective mail-order catalogues are all about fantasy: They offer us the opportunity to project ourselves into a ready-made lifestyle, maybe one where we have a gamine haircut and make occasional trips to Paris (Anthropologie) or one where we unwind from our high-powered jobs by entertaining our sophisticated friends with elaborate meals (Williams-Sonoma). Catalogues

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Uncertain Embrace

    The decades-long boom in financial services has created tremendous wealth for a handful of people. The once-stodgy banking sector became a Xanadu for the quantitatively gifted, attracting talent that might have once been drawn to industry or academia. But has this transformation contributed to the growth of the real economy? In A Call for Judgment, economist Amar Bhidé argues that it has not. Rather, it has undermined the foundations of free-market capitalism by encouraging a dangerous centralization of financial decision making.

    Unlike Simon Johnson and Joseph Stiglitz, economists who’ve also

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Things Fall Apart

    In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered one of history’s best-known characterizations of modernity. In the “bourgeois epoch,” they said, “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

    This formulation was an exaggeration—it appeared in a manifesto, after all. But unlike Marx and Engels’s hope for a communist future, their insights into modernity remain perspicacious.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Food Fights

    Since humanity emerged from nomadism, the cultivation of food has been a key component of our culture. It’s a reflection of wealth, an indication of mechanical prowess, and an instrument of war. And as historian Nick Cullather reminds us, food was also the basis for some of the most charged encounters of the cold war, as played out in the developing political and market systems of Asia. In The Hungry World, he argues that such efforts amounted to a technocratic seduction of the Asian peasantry—a wide-scale effort of social and technological engineering intended to showcase the fruits of the

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    It's All Just Talk

    If all thinkers are either foxes or hedgehogs, then Kierkegaard was decidedly a hedgehog. By his own emphatic acknowledgment, everything he wrote had a single purpose: to arouse a certain state of mind, or soul, in each of his readers. He called this state of mind “the consciousness of sin.” What he meant by that is something like what Saint Augustine and Martin Luther meant, but not exactly. In the difference lie his originality and his importance for us.

    The Present Age was written in 1846 and is newly reissued with a midcentury introduction by existentialist philosopher Walter Kaufmann.

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Last Shots

    Seattle is among the unlikelier American cities to be settling its accounts of racial strife. After all, the home of grunge, Starbucks, and the Space Needle prides itself on a certain shaggy, do-it-yourself civic sensibility. It’s the town of Frasier, Bill Gates, and Jimi Hendrix, not Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, or Martin Luther King Jr. Still, as journalist Doug Merlino makes clear in The Hustle, the overcast capital has plenty of its own unresolved racial legacies—and like virtually all major American cities, these come refracted through patterns of class segregation, Chamber of Commerce–sanctioned

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Bodies of Work

    Since the 2007–2009 “WACK!” exhibition in Los Angeles and New York, there has been a passionate reinvestigation of feminist art. Amelia Jones, to give just one example, wonders in a recent X-Tra magazine essay whether feminist artists have regressed to a desire to “make money out of the bodies (and the bodies-of-work) of women.” What better time, then, to publish Correspondence Course? This letter collection offers insights from many of the artists who started these debates in the first place, Carolee Schneemann in particular. Since the late ’50s, her paintings, installations, and films have

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century

    A rubbery lump, the human brain swirling in a specimen jar is an unimposing sight—more an overgrown mushroom than the seat of consciousness. The old gray matter is just that: gray. But when depicted by skilled anatomists or subjected to microscopes, MRIs, and electroencephalographs by neuroscientists, the brain and its parts can offer up visually bracing displays that call to mind an array of painters—from Motherwell and Kline to Julie Mehretu and Fred Tomaselli. Portraits of the Mind begins with a sketch of the nervous system done in eleventh-century Cairo that ably represents the movement of

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  • print • Dec/Jan 2011

    Haunted Houses

    A haunting is a doorway into the private history of place. Such is the idea of Corinne May Botz’s compelling collection of photographs (and accompanying oral narratives) from eighty allegedly haunted houses, which includes mostly private residences, like the one above from Orange County, Virginia, as well as a few legendary sites like Edgar Allan Poe’s home in Baltimore and Alice’s Grave on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where people (including Botz) have seen Alice’s ghost, said to be searching for her engagement ring. Nineteenth-century spiritualists employed photography as a medium to the

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  • review • November 11, 2010

    X’ed Out by Charles Burns

    Like a lot of good adventure stories, Charles Burns’s graphic novel X’ed Out begins in the dark. Alternating color fields give way to black, and then our first image: the silhouetted head of Tintin, the character created by the classic cartoon artist Herge. A panel later it becomes clear that it’s not Tintin we’re looking at, but a character named Nitnit, who wakes up and follows his black cat, Inky (Tintin’s white dog was named Snowy), through more darkness: this time into a hole in a brick wall that leads to a sand-hued landscape worthy of Herge himself. A few pages later, Nitnit fades out.

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