Category: Culture

Getting In, Selling Out

Since the turn of the twentieth century, admission into America’s most elite colleges has always been a straightforward matter of selling out. The days when pure wit garnered fresh high school graduates passage into the academic aristocracy have faded like … Read More

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Museum Briefs II

I. “Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde” at the Met Investing Vollard with the almost statesmanlike title, “Patron of the Avant-Garde” is pretty generous for someone Paul Gauguin once called “the worst kind of crocodile.” Maecenas he … Read More

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Standard Grievance

Many fine newspapers have recently lamented over the future of our beautiful planet. We are told that polar bears grow hungry in the Arctic, oceans threaten to drown skyscrapers, and that we—poor, frail humans—must swelter as Earth becomes Furnace.

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Museum Briefs

1. “Picasso and American Art” (through Jan. 28, 2007) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century. Or so I contend. One measure of his greatness, currently on display at the Whitney’s … Read More

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Morgan Wallen’s Canceled Empire

A Nass writer considers the popularity and cancellation of country star Morgan Wallen.

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“Art Comes From Art”

Morton Feldman was, it could be fairly said, the twentieth century’s most talkative composer.

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With Our Thoughts We Make the World

Watching Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold while reading the Dhammapada.

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Analyze This

Barack Obama–U.S. Senator and Democratic candidate for president–has, if nothing else, my entire extended, voting-age family in a polarized tizzy. My mother isn’t voting for Obama because of his smoker’s teeth–my uncle because his middle name is Hussein. My father likes his health care platform–his father-in-law is filled with warmth by his back story and earnestness. Me? I’m voting for Obama because he won a Grammy.

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Blogging Dobby

David Dobkin is a busy man. As Dean of the Faculty, he supervises the hiring and tenuring of professors, and oversees each academic department on campus. A former computer science professor, Dobkin has also found time to teach a freshman seminar, and he serves as a JP advisor. But no matter how full his day becomes, Dobkin never neglects his side job: faculty photoblogger.

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Arrivederci, Baby

The last episode of Sex and the City was totally awesome, and I should know because I watched it.

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Manscaping

Before my senior year of high school, I had relegated the concept of manscaping to metrosexual metropolises like New York and Los Angeles.

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Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Me

Durang’s latest, reviewed.

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