Country Life Magazine – December 27, 2023: The latest issue features ‘This Splendid Land’ – Landscapes, Landmarks, Houses and Gardens; The Art of Knot Tying; Winston Churchill’s interior-design tips; A unicorn in the garden – fantastic beasts tamed…
Long-standing Country Life contributor Charles Quest-Ritson is literally the man who wrote the book on roses — specifically The RHS encyclopedia of Roses — and back in June, he shared some tips on sharing and planting cuttings which proved enormously popular.
The New Yorker – January 1 & 8, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresBianca Bagnarelli’s “Deadline” – The artist evokes a moment suspended between the old and the new.
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
Apollo Magazine(December 23, 2023): The new January 2024 issue features‘The Last Days of Vincent Van Gogh’; What’s in store for the art market?; Paris pays tribute to Agnès Varda, and more…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 22, 2023): The latest issue features MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby; My Jewish Charlie Brown Christmas – The Peanuts special is the most overtly Christian TV holiday classic. So why does it speak to me so deeply?; Seven Fishes (Not Seven Dishes) for Christmas Eve – A modern Italian American take on the Feast of the Seven Fishes offers a streamlined menu any family can pull off….
Roland Lazenby’s big biography of Magic Johnson gives us a wealth of detail, a huge cast of characters and, in a way, the tapestry of our time.
By Thomas Beller
MAGIC: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, by Roland Lazenby
I once asked a portrait photographer why no one ever smiled in her pictures, and she replied, “A smile is a mask.”
I thought of this aphorism as I read Roland Lazenby’s 800-page biography of Magic Johnson. Sports Illustrated declared his smile to be one of the two greatest smiles of the 20th century. (The other was Louis Armstrong’s.) As Missy Fox, the daughter of his high school coach, says in the book, “That is the one thing he’s always had, that smile.”
My Jewish Charlie Brown Christmas
The Peanuts special is the most overtly Christian TV holiday classic. So why does it speak to me so deeply?
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was a one-of-a-kind wonder when it premiered in 1965 and remains so almost 60 years later. Unlike the other jingle-belled baubles that TV throws down the chimney each year, it is melancholy and meditative. The animation is minimalist and subdued, full of grays and wafting snowflakes. I could wrap myself in the Vince Guaraldi jazz score like a quilt.
As visitors exit “First Kings of Europe,” the gift shop offers a kind of test. Two craft beers were created for the exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and Off Color Brewing: Beer for Kings, made from top-quality rich and ancient grains, and Beer for Commoners, made from the more modest ingredients of the poor. Beneath the racks of beer hang T-shirts with the art for each. Which identity does the visitor want to take home: commoner or king? The answer for most exhibitions celebrating the awe-inspiring treasures of royalty would be easy, but “First Kings of Europe” is a different kind of show, with an ambitious new approach to how we display and envision power, kingship, and history.
London Review of Books (LRB) – December 20, 2023: The latest issue features Stevenson in Edinburgh; Katherine Mansfield’s Lies; James Meek changes the channel, and Israel and Germany…
Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television by Peter Biskind
Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation
Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany by Esra Özyürek
Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust by Andrew Port
America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life by Claire Rydell Arcenas
The Morgan Library & Museum (December 18, 2023) – Diane Wolfthal, David and Caroline Minter Chair Emerita in the Humanities and Professor Emerita of Art History, Rice University, and Dei Jackson, Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts here at the Morgan, discuss their current exhibition “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality,” which charts the economic revolution that took place at the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.
Trade was conducted on an unprecedented scale, banks were established, and coinage proliferated like never before. The widespread use of money in everyday life transformed every aspect of European society, including its values and culture. Bringing together some of the most acclaimed manuscripts in the Morgan’s collection and other exceptional objects including a renaissance purse, a brass alms box, and a hoard of coins, this exhibition will explore the fate of the avaricious, attitudes towards the poor, contentious lending practices, and money management.
The famous Hours of Catherine of Cleves, the Hours of Henry VIII, and the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France will be presented from a decidedly new angle, combining economic and art history to consider the early history of capitalism and the crisis in values that it sparked. These will feature alongside lesser known treasures, including an Italian account book in its original binding and a stunning leaf from a register of creditors made in Bologna, Italy, in 1394–95. As people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values, and morality, the themes addressed in this exhibition are as relevant as ever.
The New Yorker – December25, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover features“The Flip Side” – The annual Cartoons & Puzzles Issue, inhabitants of a colorless New York coexist with their doppelgängers in a topsy-turvy reality.
The puzzles spread from the United States across the globe, but the American crossword today doesn’t always reflect the linguistic changes that immigration brings.
Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and—in a tasteless bit of irony—the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump.
A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, near the company’s factory, in Molsheim, France. The car, which has lusciously curved side panels, has been produced in a limited run of five hundred. Although its engine is as big as a Shetland pony, the interior is eerily quiet.
Return to New York City
Revisiting old haunts leads to revelations about “real life.”
The Point Magazine (December 17, 2023) – The latest issue features ‘Entering History’ – Leave it to Zadie Smith to include a political Rorschach test in her latest novel; ‘Within the Pretense of No Pretense’ – Technology was the wonder of our age. It seemed to promise us power, and we took this power for our own; Venice Architecture Biennale – The city of Venice may very well be, as the architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri once claimed, “an unbearable challenge to the world of modernity,”, and more….
The Morgan Library & Museum
Boomers Daily 