My in-laws’ house is more than 115 years old, and when clearing out a newly discovered room in their basement—I think they knocked down a wall for some reason involving the heating system—they came across a stack of newspapers from 1912. In one edition, there was a full-page cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt as Icarus, his […]
Author Archives: Sally
More Inconvenient Truth
On November 29th, the sixteenth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change began in Cancun. To mark the occasion, Google Earth Outreach—launched to give high-tech visualization tools to environmental non-profits and public-benefit organizations—released the latest installment of its educational videos: a sobering look at global warming, hosted by Kofi […]
Come Together
PBS Arts Online launched in August to “promote experimentation and exploration”; so far, this goal has taken the form of Flickr-group collaborations and, most recently, “Remembering Lennon,” in which fans can upload video testaments to their favorite memories of John Lennon. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
Ancient Amazingness
This week’s Brieflier Noted included “The Golden Mean,” by Annabel Lyon, which sort of sounds like my wet dream in heaven as overseen by Santa Claus: This vivid imagining of the encounter between Aristotle and the young Alexander the Great casts the philosopher as a manic-depressive, veering “from black melancholy to golden joy.” Right?! Tweet
Deep Travel
Think of that feeling you have when you’re on a truly great vacation: your stress levels drop, trivial concerns reveal themselves to be just that, and you feel—you know—that life’s purpose is deeper and simpler than what you’d believed before (side note: this happens to me every time I go to New Orleans). Now think […]
Truth and Dare
This week’s Brieflier Noted included “By Nightfall,” by Michael Cunningham; “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” by Douglas Starr; “Foreign Bodies,” by Cynthia Ozick; and “How to Live,” by Sarah Bakewell. The selection from the “By Nightfall” review intrigued me: “Cunningham’s latest novel seems almost like a dare: can Auguste Rodin, Daisy Buchanan, Damien Hirst, Gustav […]
Watchdogs
Last week, Transparency International—an organization that aims to raise awareness of governmental abuses for private gain, including bribery, kickbacks, and embezzlement —released its 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index, a measurement of public-sector corruption in a hundred and seventy-eight countries worldwide. Read more at newyorker.com… Tweet
Guggenheim Mashup
This summer, just when it seemed that the art world was suffering from biennial overload, the Guggenheim Museum and YouTube announced a fresh approach. Their joint venture, “YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video” set out “to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget,” and […]
Feminism and the 2010 Midterm Elections
What do yesterday’s election results mean for women? This is the question I asked Rebecca Traister, a senior writer at Salon, whose book on the 2008 election, “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” is reviewed this week in The New Yorker. In her book, Traister focuses on the anti-Hillary Clinton sentiment that polarized the Democratic party, as […]
Brieflier Noted
Kicked off a new section on the Book Bench today: Brieflier Noted, which features a sentence–maybe even two! Crazy!–from each Briefly Noted book review in the magazine. I plan to do this every Tuesday. This week’s issue includes reviews on “The Convent,” by Panos Karnezi; “C,” by Tom McCarthy; “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” by Rebecca […]