My partner Dave spends his waking hours advocating for a shift in thinking about how we can solve the biggest global problems, the ones that can be named in just a few words that everyone everywhere understands. Clean water. Health care. Housing. Safety of women and children. Human trafficking. On the topic of human trafficking, […]
Environments
Thigh Line, and Other Urban Tales
The High Line as it looked in August Like just about everybody else, I love the new High Line in Manhattan. So it is easy to enjoy a recent piece about public spaces in the New Yorker. Written by Lauren Collins, the newly-created (and mixed blessing) pedestrian mall at Times Square is juxtaposed to the […]
Third Acts
This morning I received an email from George Wingate, an artist and my first roommate in Manhattan oh so many years ago. He sent me an excerpt from a page torn from an old New Yorker that he found while cleaning his studio barn. Kenneth Tynan comments on the death of Janet Flanner in 1978 […]
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Cities and Ambition: Paul Graham
Paul Graham is a 21st century Renaissance man. A brilliant technologist (he has a long list of Web-based inventions,) he also studied painting at RISD and Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Last night I was at a party—in Cambridge, for the record—where his name was spoken with such reverence I came home and immediately […]
Compassionless White
More from David Batchelor’s Chromophobia: In the chapter titled “Whitescapes”, Batchelor describes going to a party at the home of an art collector in London. His description of that experience is hauntingly familiar to me, but one that I have never thought through in such explicit detail: The house looked ordinary enough from the outside: […]