Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters — “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” — by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumnaMargaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of “likeability.” (There’s also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)
In which John visits the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where his wife is a curator, and thinks about the work of the artist and dissident Ai Weiwei while walking through “According to What,” his first major retrospective in the United States. If you live in or near Indianapolis, you should really see the show. It’s very special, and will be here until July 21st.
We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.
Anyone who’s traveled to popular touristic sites knows the feeling of being caught in the crossfire of countless camera lenses—the annoyed (and annoying) jockeying to capture the perfect shot…which in most cases looks exactly like everyone else’s. When we stumbled across Richard Silver’s photographs of iconic monuments, we were shocked—caught in the same tourist hustle, Silver manages to give us a new perspective on famous landmarks we didn’t think possible. Read more!
How to take the “monumental” out of the worlds monuments. Super cool.
