Images that mesmerize and galvanize.
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Like the ant, the teenage stoner labors ceaselessly and uncomplaining, pursuing an arduous task that casual onlookers would dismiss as pointless, yet which is essential to the little creature’s survival. Like the ant, the stoner […]
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Here’s a short film that captured my fancy, discovered via Twitter architecture maven @twiliteprincess: Alex Roman’s “Kahn’s Library,” which features the 1965 Phillips Exeter Academy Library designed by Louis Kahn. As a modernist interior the […]
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The first time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat was in November or December 1978, at the Mudd Club. His hair was dyed orange and cut very short with a v-shaped widow’s peak in the front. He […]
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What caused me to pick this item out of the trash heap was not its title — there are better editions of DeQuincey’s book out there (if none so pocket-sized) — but its publisher. Appeal […]
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This was the view out my back window in New York City for more than ten years. That time (1979-1990) was the heyday of Wild Style, when graffiti truly became an artform, as is documented […]
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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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Reminiscing about my early days in the used-paper trade, I find that I can become tender if not actually moist-eyed at the thought of the publications that were both produced and purchased by the raincoat […]
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Just about as rare as if it had never been published at all, this may be the only extant copy of Dave Carluccio’s only book — typed, photocopied, folded, and stapled by its author in 1980 […]
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THE SUBJECT, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. […]
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ASIDE FROM BRANDY and cigars, no product on the market is packaged quite as traditionally as cigarette papers. Nearly every item on your grocer’s shelf gets an image update every few years to make sure […]
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THAT IS THE APT TITLE of the Columbia University fight song. It’s odd that I remember it, because I can’t have heard it more than once or twice — my time there was the absolute […]
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ONE DAY VERY SOON it will happen that our heroes, having searched and studied ancient property maps on file at the bureau of records, having rented a basement storage space on the opposite side of […]
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“I am the sum of my small steps,” announce the handwritten-style notes in an advertisement torn from a recent issue of Oprah Magazine. Ecce Middlebrow’s ideal American woman, forever in pursuit of a clear (un-anxious, […]
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FROM THE STRUGGLE between Cartesian science and the Classics lampooned by Jonathan Swift in his “Battle of the Books,” to the “Two Cultures” argument of physicist and novelist C. P. Snow, to the “nonoverlapping magisteria” […]
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We know, we know: the Three Wolves Moon T-Shirt thing is old news: snarky hipster posts an Amazon “review” of one of those silk-screened t-shirts of the trippy druidic sort — others sport dragons, dolphins, […]
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