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Staff Picks: Bookshop Door, Thinking Fast and Slow
The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door at the Harry Ransom Center. Thinking, Fast and Slow sums up the cognitive research that won Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize in Economics (a first for a psychologist)....
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Staff Picks: Sexual Humiliation, Advanced Style
“No one wants to be called a penis with a thesaurus. For an English-language novelist, raised and educated and self-consciously steeped in the tradition of the Anglo-American novel, in which female...
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Barnaby Conrad: Author, Matador, Bon Vivant, and Thorn in Hemingway’s Side
My brief acquaintance with Barnaby Conrad, one of the bon vivant-iest of all modern bon vivant writers, happened because a stranger decided to wear a certain necklace one evening last fall. I’d been...
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Floating Capital
Fear him. The eeriest and most gravid of today’s new emoji is this guy: the so-called Man in Business Suit Levitating. In Apple’s rendition, he cuts an imposing figure, like a rich kid who’s just aced...
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Impersonating Trump in China, and Other News
In China, Tang Xinhua, a retired music professor, is preparing for a new career as a Trump impersonator. Photo: Zou Dangrong, via the New York Times. You know times are hard when you find yourself...
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The Source Material
Dipping into the thousands of ephemeral films in the Prelinger Archives. Still from Design for Dreaming. There’s a scene in Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic of the director of Glen or Glenda, that...
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The Making of a Comics Biography, Part 1
With a career spanning thirty-four years, cartoonist Joe Ollmann is fairly old. He is the author of seven graphic novels; one of them, This Will All End in Tears, won a Doug Wright Award for Best...
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The Making of a Comics Biography, Part 2
Read Part 1 here. With a career spanning thirty-four years, cartoonist Joe Ollmann is fairly old. He is the author of seven graphic novels; one of them, This Will All End in Tears, won a Doug Wright...
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The Cows Will Kill You, and Other News
Henri Rousseau, Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris, 1909. Go ahead and laugh at the cows, with their multiple stomachs, their indolent cud chewing, their superfluity of feces. The cows will...
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The Impossibility of Knowing Mark Twain
Lamano Studios Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one...
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