How to explain the miracle of an institution as gargantuan, complex, and pivotal to society as “government”? Watch Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall.
Tag: Boston
Babe Ruth’s New York @100
Ruth embodied a new and yet very old phenomenon—celebrity—in a technological era poised to capitalize on him.
When Books Had Chains, and Pages Were Illuminated
In a side room of the Boston College site of the three-part exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections ...
How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the ...
Bellatrix and the American Revolution
Bellatrix, a star in the Orion constellation, is 240 light-years from Earth. The light emitted from Bellatrix that we currently see began its journey just prior to the American Revolution, when Paul ...
Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from ...
Asian American Literature and the Price of Failure
Don Lee’s The Collective explores the politics of Asian American culture through the story of three characters: Joshua Yoon, Jessica Tsai, and Eric Cho. A Korean American from Mission Viejo ...
Binocular Vision, or Anne FrankDoesn’t Live Here Anymore
Do we know how to talk about Jewish writers when they are not talking about Anne Frank? Around the time that Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories won the National Book Critics ...
Raging Against Obscurity
Two recent books give new spins on the artist’s life: both writers had raging youths but one got famous and one didn’t. Jeanette Winterson and Eileen Myles, tough, smart, ambitious women who escaped ...