Month: January 2003
“Local Bounty,” by Calvin Trillin, from
; I would guess, from my own experience, that most residential buildings in Manhattan receive menus from at least one restaurant every day. For a while, in fact, it was common in my neighborhood, Greenwich Village, to see signs on doors saying “No Menus”—sometimes in both English and Chinese. I never thought of posting such […]
“My Brush with History: Air War Over Fort Wayne,” by Dr. Ted Logan, from
;When a plane came roaring low over my house, I thought it might be the first Japanese bomber. Worse still, packages were being dumped from the airplane: incendiaries! They turned out to be small broadsides announcing that Japan had surrendered and that more details were available on the local radio station WGL. My friends and […]
“Unoriginal sins,” by Elizabeth Farrelly from the
;Take three identical canvases, all square, all painted red. One is a famous minimalist painting, one a “clever bit of Moscow landscape,” and one a paint sample. The objects themselves, in this question as posed by New York writer Arthur Danto in 1981, cannot be distinguished. And yet the first is priceless, the last without […]
Up to 98 percent of the 38 millio
Up to 98 percent of the 38 million burglar alarms which sounded in 1998 were false.
Willets, curlews, godwits, snipes, woodcocks, turnstones, phalaropes, dowitchers, yellowlegs and pee
Willets, curlews, godwits, snipes, woodcocks, turnstones, phalaropes, dowitchers, yellowlegs and peeps are all birds also called sandpipers.
Scalloped hammerhead, white and thresher sharks declined
Scalloped hammerhead, white and thresher sharks declined 75 percent between 1986 and 2000.
The Six-Foot View of the New World Trade Center
In the end, the skyline of Manhattan enlists only a small emotional corner of my brain. Lauding it reminds me too much of city folks in the country saying, “Look at the cows!” Of course. The buildings, like the cows, could be said to symbolize their environment. More important to me in the city, however, […]
“The United States of America has gone mad,” by John Le Carré, from the London
;How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But […]
“The Market on High,” by Scoop Drummond, from Hamptons
;Staying power is king. The question is: will the ways of the real world finally hit the fantasyland of the Hamptons? There are currently more eight-digit homes for sale here than ranch houses in Rochester. Will that change? Or, does the local landscape become only momentarily inconvenienced by world events? Buyers ultimately make the market. […]