I had only ever seen clips of “Stealing Beauty,” a short by Israeli video artist Guy Ben-Ner that was exhibited at Postmasters Gallery two years ago. But now my internet wanderings have unearthed all eighteen minutes! The film is all at once a family drama (starring the artist’s actual family), a slapstick comedy, and a [...]
Remember the craze for magnetic poetry a few years ago? It seemed like everyone’s refrigerator was covered in tiny words, rearranged by friends drifting in and out of the kitchen. I was never any good at fridge poetry, myself, but if you miss it, there’s isnoop.net’s Magnetic Words, a virtual fridge covered with words just [...]
It’s one thing to read that, say, airlines use 47 plastic cups per second, and quite another to see 47 virtual cups per second cascading down your computer screen. This is the genius of So Many A Second, which converts events (trees cut, stars born, blog posts published) into visual icons, making statistics visible. My [...]
The journal Lapham’s Quarterly recently created a nifty chart called “Friends, Lovers, and Family” that traces the connections between notable writers, artists, actors, etc. It’s mostly writers, really, which makes it a sort of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” for the literary set — except that, in a wonderfully sly move, Kevin Bacon is actually [...]
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When I was growing up, my dad had a stack of Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1950’s. These fascinated me. My favorite articles presented things like the “kitchen of the future,” which, if I recall correctly, included disposable plates that dissolved in hot water after use. Oh, how I wish I could find that picture!
If [...]
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Ah, podcasts. There are so many good ones out there, but they are often so poorly organized that I give up before I find anything useful. Which is frustrating, since I am certain – certain! – that just the right podcast exists for today’s workout!
But there are a few shining lights, sites that organize their [...]
Every election season, we hear a lot about “Main Street,” a reference intended to evoke a sense of universal American-ness. But, as I leaned from Mapping Main Street, there are actually more than 10, 466 streets named Main in the United States. And Mapping Main Street is trying to document all of them! Not only [...]
I’ve fallen quite in love with photographer Susan Mullally’s thought-provoking project What I Keep, a series of portraits. Here is her own description of it:
This work explores ideas of class, race, ownership, value, cultural identification and faith. I collaborate with members of The Church Under the Bridge in Waco, Texas, a non-denominational, multi-cultural Christian church [...]
Courtesy of friends and internet rambling, I’ve seen a number of interesting book sites this week. So I thought I’d pass a few along to you!
An offshoot of the Reading the Past blog, Reusable Cover Art is a collection of book covers that incorporate the same image into their cover art. Some of the juxtapositions [...]
Friday, December 11, 2009
One of my favorite regular columns in the New York Times Magazine is The Ethicist, in which humor writer Randy Cohen thinks through moral quandaries presented by his readers. It’s a handy reminder that the humanities are not something removed from “real life.” That they are quite inseparable from it, actually.
Select columns are available on [...]