After finishing a series of photographs, Jed Martin feels like he never wants to take another shot. So does Cindy Sherman. There are other similarities between the fictional photographer Jed Martin"whose pictures are described in Michel Houellebecq's novel The Map and The Territory"and the ...
The de Kooning show just closed at MoMA, and I just finished reading The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin. We are as obsessed with oil as de Kooning was with oil paints. Trying to follow US energy policy is as pendulous as ...
Things aren’t looking too good these days, says Slavoj Zizek in his latest book, Living in the End Times. The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ...
In Miami Beach on Monday morning, the convention center was strewn with cardboard, Scotch Tape, Styrofoam peanuts, and other packing litter. The hotel bars were littered with hung-over Europeans loitering over their Scotch and peanuts, the aftermath of Art Basel Miami Beach. For ten years now Basel ...
I just drove to Kansas and back, 2600 miles listening to the radio and pondering American industry, the heartland, affairs of the heart, and other organs. On either side of the road were billboards advertising psychological release—deferred (up in heaven) or immediate (down at the Adult ...
David Grossman. To the End of the Land. Vintage (reprint edition), 2011. 672pp. Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Back Bay Books (revised edition), 2009. 416pp. This is a story of two writers named Grossman—one David, the other Dave. Both of ...
On Lake Geneva I float, looking at France across the water, where the grass is not greener but the prices are much lower. I don’t know how it works exactly, but I gather it has something to do with floating exchange rates: Things being unstable everywhere else, traders rush to buy some steady ...
On the blue Mediterranean I float, reading: It’s only now that we realize that the gleaming wealth of the past years was shored up by a perverse conjunction of bank loans, dizzying rounds of postdated, overdrawn checks, [and] the extreme illusionism of an acrobatic Mandrake. It refers to a ...
On the blue Aegean I float, reading: Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief. This is not in the latest newspaper, but in a new book by anthropologist David Graeber called Debt: The First 5000 Years. It ...
It is summer in the city and the smell of trash rises from the hot streets. There is trash on the sidewalks, trash in the bookstores, and trash in the movie theaters. It is, as it already was at the turn of the last century when Henry James said it, an “age of trash triumphant.” America was ...
