Gary Cooper on Doodling

By: Joshua Glenn

Here’s a postscript to Matthew Battles’ terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be “pixillated” — another word that features importantly in Mr. Deeds Goes […]

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In Praise of Doodling

By: Matthew Battles

Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. And yet for all its primitivity, and despite its surely universal occurrence among the literate peoples of the world, […]

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OGXers in all but name

By: Joshua Glenn

In today’s New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a few half-thoughts about a generational cohort born, she claims, between 1955 […]

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Double Exposure (7): Free-Range Children

By: Joshua Glenn

“The domestic beast has been bred to special purpose; the tame animal is a wild thing brought to heel. The feral creature, by contrast, is a domesticated animal living without the intercession of man, beyond […]

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Double Exposure (6) — Food Fight

By: Joshua Glenn

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008), is a highbrow. I say so not because he’s a graduate of Bennington, Oxford, and Columbia […]

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Steve Wozniak

By: Patrick Cates

When most people hear “Steve” and “Apple” mentioned in the same sentence, they think of Steve Jobs, ringmaster of technology fetishists, evangelizing about the latest sleek iToy. They forget about the “Other Steve,” STEVE WOZNIAK […]

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Falling Is Free

By: Matthew Battles

FREEFALL IS ONE chief theme in this season’s action films. One of the most scintillating scenes of the J. J. Abrams Star Trek movie has Kirk, Sulu, and a doomed redshirt skydive from suborbital altitude […]

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Double Exposure (5): the Zen of Leviathan

By: Matthew Battles

“My life is made up of so many other lives…. all of them rearranging themselves.” This advertisement for the Palm Pre smartphone promotes the curious Zen of being your own Dear Leader. Pajama-clad minions engaged […]

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Jacko and Farrah

By: Joshua Glenn

Earlier this week, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam gave my generational periodization scheme a shout-out. Beam writes: Glenn has devoted considerable time — too much time, frankly — to slicing up the post World War […]

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Lost Boy

By: Matthew Battles

AMIDST THE CYCLE of encomiums spurred by Michael Jackson’s death last week, his weirdness has been treated as an unfortunate epiphenomenon and distraction from his greatness. But the weird — a thoroughgoing weird without stint […]

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Apollo

By: Matthew Battles

1 …Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: […]

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