December 27, 2017 Best of 2017 The Dark Feels Different in November By Nina MacLaughlin We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Godfried Schalcken, Young Girl with a Candle (detail), 1670–1675. “I’m in the November of my life,” said Francesca, a fifty-eight-year-old curator with good shoulders and dark lively eyes and dark wavy hair and a laugh that came from deep in her gut. Two years ago, she was told she had two-and-a-half years to live. “This was my relationship with death before,” she said, holding her arms apart at full wingspan. “Knew it would happen. Never thought about it.” Then she brought her index fingers together so they touched in front of her chest. “This was the diagnosis.” Death was on top of her. The stamp of an expiration date on her forehead annihilated all other thought. In time, and with titanic mental effort, the initial all-consuming horror gave way. “In November, you’re winding down,” she said. “It means incorporating less sharp edges, more smoke.” Which is maybe to say more mystery, more potential. The sharp edges of fact give way to the blur of the question mark, the uncertainty, the quiet. “The space of nothingness is where one finds his or her own self and life’s richness,” writes the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. “This is a wonderful time of my life,” Francesca said. Read More >>
December 27, 2017 Best of 2017 Emoji Poetry Contest By Nadja Spiegelman and Rosa Rankin-Gee We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! T. S. Eliot once said, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” But he forgot to add: “And millennial poets translate poems into emojis.” Can you guess the following famous verses? Read More >>
December 26, 2017 Best of 2017 The Library at Grey Gardens By Lesley M.M. Blume We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Photo: Lesley M. M. Blume A few years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that Grey Gardens was up for rent, I thought it had to be a bizarre joke: What kind of a sick twist would pay to spend time in the notorious cat-and-rot-scented squalor so memorably depicted in the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens? I knew Jackie O had paid to rehabilitate the place after Long Island authorities had nearly condemned it and ousted its inhabitants, Jackie’s aunt Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and cousin Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie). After that embarrassment-driven overhaul, the place seemed briefly, passably pâté-worthy again—but still, it would have to be classified as “for niche tastes only.” Read More >>
December 26, 2017 Best of 2017 The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head By Benjamin Ehrlich We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Santiago Ramón y Cajal, “the father of modern neuroscience.” All images courtesy Cajal Legacy, Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid. Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact—but Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often heralded as “the father of modern neuroscience,” used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths. Contrary to prevailing theory, the Spaniard discerned that the nervous system, including the brain, comprises distinctly individual cells (neurons), which, he theorized, must communicate across the infinitesimal spaces between them (synapses). It was Cajal who first applied the term plasticity to the brain; he went so far as to recommend “cerebral gymnastics” for mental enhancement, presaging twenty-first century insights and trends about brain exercise. “If he is so determined,” Cajal said, “every man can be the sculptor of his own brain.” If all Russian literature comes from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” and all modern American literature comes from “a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” then international brain research, including grand projects like the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project, emerges from the unlikely work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Read More >>
December 26, 2017 Best of 2017 The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights By Chantel Tattoli We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! Illustration by Ellis Rosen On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of them resembled the office accoutrement of last century, when open windows and fans sent paper sailing through reeking cigarette fog. These were objet d’art. They ranged from the purely ironic (a furry outgrowth) to the purely beautiful (chain links encrusted in sherbet crystals). Many were ineffable abstracts, and a few were just satisfying (animal figurines drilled into each other). “My life doesn’t justify a paperweight,” a girlfriend remarked. “My life isn’t settled enough. You don’t buy one until you think you’re not going to move.” Read More >>
December 25, 2017 Best of 2017 Watership Down By Emily Ruskovich We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday! My parents had known each other for only three weeks when my dad asked my mom to marry him. She was stunned by his proposal, and so she said, Let me think about it. And she sat there for a few minutes in silence, thinking, while my dad, in agony, sat there and watched her think. After considering the question logically, my mom said yes, for five reasons. She laughs when she tells this story, though she assures me that it’s true. In those few minutes, she decided that even though she hardly knew my dad, she ought to marry him because: He, like her, ate the entire apple, swallowed the core and all the seeds, so she knew he was not wasteful or pretentious. He, like her, had always wanted to name a son the unusual name Rory, and that seemed an important, even wistful, thing to have in common. My dad knew all the words to the Kenny Loggins song “House at Pooh Corner,” so she knew he was probably kind to children. He, like her, was an Idaho Democrat. Most importantly, while they were dating those three weeks, they read Watership Down. That was the tipping point for my mom: if this strange and loud man could become so invested in the fates of rabbits as to have tears fill his eyes while he read, then he was, without question, a good man. They’ve been married now for thirty-three years. Read More >>