An article (with photos) on an exhibition about Jan Palach’s funeral in Prague.
Filed under ‘Links’
In 1975, Hedrick Smith wrote a great article for the New York Times Magazine on the Soviet culture of hiding information and its consequences for ordinary people.
Steven Shapin in The New Yorker on cholera and John Snow’s use of maps to end the 1848 outbreak in SoHo, London.
Keith Gessen’s New Yorker article on Brodsky is superb. Here’s a taste:
He failed to see that the social changes that made his poetry resonant in Russian had obviated just this kind of poetry in the States. Writing about his generation of idealistic Russians, he put it best: “Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought that at least that world was like themselves; now they know that it is like the others, only better dressed.
Eric Ripert’s New Knife Case
Ripert flipped through a book of leather designs and nixed the Louis Vuitton logo. “It’s a little over the top,” he said. “Like, ‘This guy’s coming to cut fish!’ ”
The New Yorker article about Eric Ripert’s new knife case is charming and pairs well with the set of photos he himself posted on Facebook.
Link Roundup
- Dear Lazyweb, where do I find a whole web site full of these? LitKicks posts a literary puzzle.
- It is a truth universally acknowledged that any book that is popular must of necessity be overrated. Justine Larbalestier selects choice excerpts from one-star reviews of Pride and Prejudice on Amazon.
- Tomas Rozycki searched for his deported family’s old home in Ukraine. Everything was not illuminated, but the blog post does come with a poem.
- The Ransom Center acquires the David Foster Wallace paper archive. To see handwritten pages of Infinite Jest and DFW’s annotations of other people’s work1, fans are setting up tent cities on the plaza to be first in line as we speak.
1You know him. Footnotes everywhere…