You’ve almost certainly seen Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker cover illustration View of the World from 9th Avenue, whether or not you read the New Yorker — and indeed, whether or not you were alive in 1976. Lower Manhattan dominates the image; beyond the Hudson river, all dissolves into near-abstraction, labeled only by a handful […]
“Can’t overstate how much everyone must go see La grande bellezza,” Ferdinand Addis tweeted in September of 2013. “I want to spend the rest of my life staring at Toni Servillo’s forehead.” At that time, he was most widely known — to the extent that he was known to the public at all — as […]
As you’d expect from a cultural figure who moves in the international music and art worlds — while running a record label called Todo Mundo — David Byrne travels a lot. What’s more notable is that, when he arrives in each world capital that requests his presence, he gets around on a bicycle. Sometimes he […]
The late Pope Francis may have been the most quotable head of the Catholic Church in living memory. His line about how “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” certainly had a way of making the rounds every few years on Twitter. Another of his […]
Harold Brodkey put out his first novel The Runaway Soul at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if “enjoying” be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he’d been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised […]
Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period’s restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it’s surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published […]
Stendhal was born and buried in France, but his tombstone describes him as a Milanese. Italo Calvino, whose life began and ended in Italy, long maintained that he wanted “New Yorker” engraved on his tombstone. Stendhal may only have lived in Milan for seven years, but that was considerably more time than Calvino’s longest stretch […]
If you want to learn a language, move to New York. It doesn’t really matter what language you want to learn: with its nearly 40-percent foreign-born population, it’s now “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” home to over 700 of them. So writes linguist and New Yorker Ross Perlin in […]
Orhan Pamuk has spent almost all of his 72 years in Istanbul. That may not be especially rare for a Turk, but it’s somewhat more surprising for one who happens to be an internationally acclaimed novelist, not to mention a Nobel laureate. When he was growing up, as he tells it in Istanbul: Memories and […]
If you’ve never visited Austin, Texas, it’s probably too late to do so now. That, in any case, is the impression I’ve received over the past fifteen years, during which time my interest in the city has greatly diminished. Word has long circulated that Austin is “over,” but until now, there hasn’t been a book […]