From The New Yorker, This Old House: David Sedaris on living in a world of antiques. Understanding the Heart of Men: Is German auteur and art-house idol Werner Herzog going Hollywood? A review of The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed. From Sign and Sight, Slovenian saga of beauty and cruelty: With his trilogy "Die Zugereisten," Lojze Kovacic bequethed a novel of the century to Slovenia. So, You Want To Be a Star? Leo Lerman's gossipy journals offer lessons on fame. Sleuth at Work: The strange case of Nancy Drew's self-confidence.
From Slate, Gunter Grass, Reconsidered What does Peeling the Onion reveal? Muse or Ruse? Our culture romanticizes the myth of artistic inspiration, perhaps because we'd like to think that some people have artistic gifts, and that great literature or beautiful music is more a question of luck than hard work. The Creative Self: Do you long to express yourself? Tips on how to start and maintain a creative life. Hypergraphia, a river of words: Is hypergraphia—the compulsive need to write—a gift or a curse? Were these the Two Gentlemen of Madrid? A new film suggests Shakespeare and Cervantes met in Spain and gave each other literary help. Trying times in Toontown: Facing the same pressures as newspapers and reporters, editorial cartoonists, usually ink-and-paper traditionalists, are dipping their brushes into the world of animated online punditry. A look at how political cartoonists are trying to come up with new forms suitable to the Internet age as newspapers drop them from their staff.
The Fantasy World of Ryan McGinley: Does photography's hot young thing deserve all the hype? Facial awareness: In the young republic of the 17th-century Netherlands, painters - and the surging new middle classes - reinvented the art of portraiture. A Python Grip on Handel: As a musical genre, oratorios — large-scale settings of biblical texts for chorus, soloists and orchestra — are hardly known for their comedy. When the saints go marchin' out: What Hurricane Katrina has done to the musicians from Preservation Hall. Local food is not necessarily virtuous: A review of Moveable Feasts: The Incredible Journeys of the Things We Eat by Sarah Murray. Do certain physiological traits make some wine critics better than others? Mike Steinberger examines the physiology of the oenophile (and part 2 and part 3). The wine industry's accelerating shift away from cork has dire economic and environmental consequences. To say nothing of lost romance.
A review of Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War Over Anonymous Sources by Norman Pearlstine. Through a glass darkly: Fifty years after his death, Malcolm Lowry remains an unsurpassed chronicler of humanity's lower depths. Blithe Spirit: A review of Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself by Ann Wroe. Alexander Nehemas on how the search for beauty will affect our moral character remains always unpredictable. Olympian ideals fall short when it comes to culture: Art struggles to match the intensity of sporting events. But what it does is illuminate the human condition in much more subtle and varied ways. Grand designs: The world’s great corporate headquarters are a history of architecture’s biggest ideas, written in stone, metal and glass. But the corporate HQ is today an endangered architectural typology.
