Tributes to David Levine, who died on Tuesday at 83, have been mulling over his place among today’s cartoonists and caricaturists. Fair enough. But his genius was really that he wasn’t like anybody else. Read more…
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For a long time, everyone has known that Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, the city where the modern was invented: the society of the spectacular. But everyone was wrong. The capital of the nineteenth century was London. Think about it. Walter Benjamin’s symbol of the Parisian modern was the arcade. The arcade! In London-according to the social campaigner Henry Mayhew, there were 300,000 dustbins, 300,000 cesspools, and three million chimneys. It was there that the truly modern was invented: industrial, overpopulated dirt. Its symbol was the slum. London was managed by a majority of minority trades, all in the business of garbage: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers. And London’s greatest describer, who converted the ghostly industrial city into a new world of words, was a novelist who could taxonomically and poetically enumerate, say, the varieties of polluted fog: “Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City–which call Saint Mary Axe–it was rusty-black.” Read more…
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The number of high school graduates has climbed to a record height this decade. You’d think that would make college admissions more competitive than ever, but a recent paper by an economist suggests otherwise. Read more…
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Come check out these mousepads in our Zazzle store.
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THEIR company names were conspicuously absent from their nametags, but that is how these hedge fund managers and analysts — members of a field known for secrecy — preferred it. They filled the party space at the W Hotel on Lexington Avenue in late October, mostly men in their 30s. Balancing drinks on easels adorned with students’ colorful drawings, they juggled PDA’s and business cards, before sitting down to poker tables to raise money for New York City charter schools. Read more…
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Artists’ letters, often literary treasures in their own right, can provide compelling windows into the private struggles, public triumphs and towering ambitions that shaped their works and lives. The evocative and revealing correspondence of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), excerpted as early as 1893, has long fed a fascination with the artist’s impassioned story. Read more…
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