 The big ideas on the small, the not-so-small, and the everyday.
By Stefany Anne Golberg |
Greetings from Here Joseph Roth's books and letters both pine for the past. But while the books balance sadness with joy, the letters are all melancholy.
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Always the Optimist For Václav Havel, solidarity wasn't enough; people need to strive for a universal unity.
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Immortal Combat Shelley released St. Irvyne 200 years ago. The novel has since faded, but its ideas surrounding life and death flicker on.
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If You Pick Us, Do We Not Bleed? Studies of plant perception help us understand what it means to be a plant, of course, but also what it means to be us.
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Waves of Memories The sea causes some of our worst natural disasters. And the sea doesn't want us to forget it.
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Privacy Policy In the 19th century, Baudelaire struggled with the private/public divide. In the 21st, we all do.
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To the Devil If you want to know God, read the Bible. If you want to know humanity, read The Devil's Dictionary.
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Running the Numbers Roman Opalka's ''Details'' series suggests an obsession with death, but all those numbers helped the artist live in the moment.
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Wild at Heart The Bureau of Land Management is planning a roundup of wild horses in Nevada, but the animal will outlast any federal agency.
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Blue Bloods What would make people wear blue face paint and Tyvek pants on a hot summer day? The chance to break a Smurfs world record!
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A Temporary Madness Dylan Thomas and his father lost themselves in rage. The problem is, rage burns out.
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| That's All, Folk! The American Folk Art Museum is leaving its 53rd Street building for a smaller space on Lincoln Square. This is a good thing.
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Can You See Me Now? Some want the Deaf to be considered a distinct ethnicity, but will hearing Americans ever stop thinking of deafness as a disability?
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Double Trouble We no longer consider conjoined twins ''freaks.'' But two hundred years after the birth of Chang and Eng, they continue to puzzle us.
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Taking the Plunge Photographs of river baptisms highlight how all religious pageantry has two audiences.
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Send in Whatever Clowns Are Left The number of stage performers has fallen 61 percent in five years. With them goes an entire form of experience.
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| The Sound of Silence Why is the guitar a folk instrument and not a piano? And what drew Picasso to it?
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Travelin' Man Thirty years later, An African in Greenland remains as powerful a study of travel and place as ever.
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The Doctors and the Divine Neurotheologists want to explain spiritual experiences, but even a medical diagnosis leaves room for the divine. Take Chopin...
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Water View Honestly, we don't need to move under the sea. But it sure would give civilization a proper reboot.
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Garden Party If you want to find Olmsted and Socrates in NYC, find a nice little herb growing on a tiny little windowsill.
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Let the Bedbugs Bite! You can hire an exterminator to spray for bedbugs. You can wrap your mattress in plastic and pack away all your possessions. Or you can ask, What would Camus do?
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Monsters, Inc. The 15th-century saw the world trying to organize and order itself. Arcimboldo's creatures were there to say, Not so fast.
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Museum, Ho! For Americans, an exhibit about waterways might as well be a show about Mars.
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Escape Act Houdini's magic trumped science and religion. But the magician pays for such power.
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The Old World Everyone is panicked that the world is aging. But let's stop to consider what such a world could be.
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Happy 200th, Snow White! When the Grimms put down their tale, they couldn't have had any idea what Disney would do to it. I mean, where are the iron shoes?!
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Rhinestone Dreams Liberace's Vegas museum is closing. Yes, both are gaudy and loud and over-the-top. But don't we all want to be bigger than ourselves?
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The King's Two Bodies They recently dug up Nicolae Ceausescu's corpse. A dictator never really dies.
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Washed Up You'd expect a beachcombing museum to have an air of melancholy. But the Juttersmuseum is a place of redemption.
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It's Your Birthday How great is it that the single shared experience across the English-speaking world involves bad craft and humiliation?
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Battle Scars In 1913, the Great Reunion celebrated the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg. Today, it reminds us that freedom is a negotiated value, always in flux.
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Strike a Pose It's insulting to call a punk a poser, but punk is a pose. Enter American Idiot the musical...
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The Explorer On the centennial of Jacques Cousteau, we consider the last explorer and the surprising focus of his curiosity.
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Land of the Rising Sunshine Boca Raton is quintessentially American today, but 100 years ago it was a hotbed of Japanese know-how.
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Puzzled The Rubik's Cube is 30. Happy birthday to the colorful, 3x3x3 battle between order and chaos.
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| American Bling The New York Times jabbed the Hartland Mansion in Vegas, but I don't find the core American aesthetic funny. I think it's kind of beautiful.
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| Gas Problem Steampunk: the 21st-century answer to 20th-century loss via a nostalgic 19th-century sensibility.
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| Stamped Out The post office is dying. The sooner the better, I say.
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| Turducken, Meet Your Match Being vegetarian doesn't mean you have to give up the historic decadence of meat stuffed in meat stuffed in more meat.
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| A Modest Proposal I am a vegetarian, so of course I read Eating Animals, which is a hot new book exploring ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
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| Ghost Story The only known film of Anne Frank is now on YouTube. Appropriately, the 12-year-old looks out from a window...
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| Life After Death Gourmet may be done, but it was only ever one soldier in a larger food army.
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| Groundskeeping Mexico has Día de los Muertos. Nepal has Gai Jatra. But America, being America, has no cohesive culture of death.
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| We Are the Martians Forty years after the moon landing, the sirens' call of space travel remains. What better time to revisit Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles?
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| The Dying of the Light Guiding Light's cancellation marks the beginning of the end for soap operas. But while the doctors, divorces, and deaths may disappear, the soap's format will survive.
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| Summer Holliday Happy birthday, Judy Holliday. We hardly knew ye. Your descendants, on the other hand...
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| Deus ex Machina The Pope wants kids to tweet. Reading the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, I can see why.
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| Swan Song Watching the 2009 Tonys and wondering, Whither the Broadway musical?
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| A Red-Checkered Blanket Everyone remembers the Wall coming down in '89, but few know of the surprising picnic that helped destroy it.
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| Vegetable Stand For change you can believe in, go vegetarian. Thoreau and the Kings did.
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