Jorge Colombo, Night Lights
Created with the iPhone’s Brushes app for the New Yorker.
All together, The New Yorker’s covers are a visual narrative of how the city — and the country, to some extent — has lived and grown for close to a century. Looks and trends and obsessions fade in and out, social classes emerge and disappear before our eyes, visual styles get re-focused. History being rife with echoes of itself, TNY’s covers often refer to previous ones, either reassessing issues from a previous era, or simply reviving the approach. After all, many of the city’s visual tunes are like jazz standards; all that artists do is to add their, er, cover versions. ~ Jorge Colombo
“
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbably beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Malcolm Gladwell: It is always a pleasure to be reviewed by someone as accomplished as Steven Pinker, even if he is unhappy with my spelling (rightly!) and with the fact that I have not joined him on the lonely ice floe of I.Q. fundamentalism.
Steven Pinker: What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.”
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There’s nothing that brightens my lunch break quite like nerds fighting it out in the letters section of the NYT Book Review.
Terrific. Patrick Moberg breaks down your online vices, one by one. Twitter being crack cocaine is just perfect.
“It’s not an Olympics. Nobody in the end actually wins anything because the fact is that we have our stories and nobody’s one story is better than anybody else’s story.” — Colum McCann, on winning the National Book Award.
Hunter S. Thompson book spotted at a London market.
I hate to brag about such a thing as a dressing room, but…
:oD
I hate to reblog celebrities but !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Taking photos of people taking photos in one of the pods of the London Eye, high above the city.