December 2011
28 posts
tooearlytoolate:
Goodbye, 2011, from Stephan...
Two bits from Lev Grossman’s list of “Top 10 Moments in Reading in 2011” for Time, the first from James Gleick’s The Information and the second from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, unfairly ripped out of context and set next to each other:
1. “In 1948 [Claude] Shannon, an engineer at Bell Labs, published a paper called ‘A Mathematical Theory of...
“People smoke, Dichter explained, because it is both a sign of virility and a...”
– In America in the 1930s a Viennese psychologist named Ernest Dichter implored advertisers to explore consumers’ unconscious desires. His insights revolutionised marketing and brought sex to advertising.
I’m very big on podcasts and at the moment I’m listening to David Hockney and Andrew Marr putter around the artist’s farm in East Yorkshire. It’s reminded me that, if you’re looking for a good holiday-themed listen, there may be no better 45 minutes this year than last week’s Start the Week: Giles Fraser (who recently resigned as Canon Chancellor of St...
Favorite series currently ongoing: “most snowiest time of the year” at sixmartinis and the seventh art. Even the stills from color films are black and white. And small. Keep scrolling.
“Kim Jong-il did not die on the run, or in a hole, or behind bars, or on the gallows. His final act of surprise was to outlast even those authoritarian peers who showed greater capacity for compromise: Qaddafi, Mubarak, and the other tin-pot potentates swept from power in this year of awakening.”
Evan Osnos on what might and, more ominously, what might not happen now.
Reactional
Night drops tristfully Over the nasturtia In Manlius Silico’s garden. The moon, wandering about En deshabille, Fawns on th’adulterous stars. Come, Manumbra, Come, I will explain to you The abstruse technicalities Of the Greek and Roman systems Of Colonization. Quien Sabe? Those Spaniards Were gay chaps - A little impalpable, but, there! I think they do this stuff much better In France....
“Herewith. Hope it serves, As always, Christopher.”
June Thomas’s guide to the best of Hitchens in Slate. See, too, the Atlantic archive. And “Hitch’s Columns” for Vanity Fair.
“This exhibition is based on a dream that I had some years ago, and which subsequently inspired a series of essays written for BBC Radio. In my dream I was visited by the musician and conceptual thinker Brian Eno, who informed me solely and with great purpose, ‘Germany Is Your America.’”
Today would be the last day to see it at Broadway 1602.
“Cézanne was discovering a complementarity between the equilibrium of the body and the inevitability of landscape. The indentations of some rocks in the forest of Fontainebleau have the intimacy of armpits. His late baigneuses form ranges like mountains. The deserted quarry at Bibémus looks like a portrait. What is the secret behind this? Cézanne’s conviction that what we perceive as...
New Yorker editor David Remnick on why — and exactly how — Gingrich’s reference to the Palestinians as an “invented” people was meant to reverberate up and down certain Floridian corridors.
