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Hey, Babe, and Other News

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On the Shelf

THUMB_Frédéric_Soulacroix_-_The_Cavalier's_Kiss

Frédéric Soulacroix, The Cavalier’s Kiss

  • Julian Gough’s celebration of Joyce wins the award for Title of the Year: “James Joyce: You can’t ignore the bastard.” “Joyce entered your life very differently in rural Ireland in the early 1980s. Back then, he still existed outside the official system. Too difficult, too scandalous for school. It was still possible for teenagers to read Joyce as an act of rebellion against teachers, government, church. You read Joyce the way you listened to late punk, or early rap.”
  • What’s the point of infantilizing pet names? “In the mid-twentieth century, Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that babies’ cuteness is an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation without which they wouldn’t survive; adults need some sort of incentive to provide them with constant care, and Lorenz thought that motive was admiring their cuteness. He believed men carry this preference into adulthood by looking for women who retain elements of babyish ‘cuteness.’”
  • The story of an art historian’s shrewd detective work: “A supposedly minor work from the Qing dynasty turned out to be a masterpiece nearly 700 years old.”
  • In 2012, before Kara Walker’s exhibition arrived there, David Allee photographed Brooklyn’s dilapidated Domino Sugar Factory. “While his pictures could not convey the smell of the factory—‘crème brûlée mixed with mold and rot’—he hoped to communicate something about its complicated history … Inside the prison-like spaces, there was also ‘a visceral sense that the work that took place here was torturous.’ At the same time, he said, ‘everything is literally sugar coated.’”
  • In the sixties, TV and film writers dreamed up a bunch of supercomputers with one thing in common: they were hell-bent on annihilating humanity.