Books
The Chairs that Architects Have Designed
Before he designed the soaring 1962 TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, Eero Saarinen experimented with gravity-defying design through his one-legged white and red Tulip chair.
Books
News
At NY Public Library, Books Now Ride the Rails from the Stacks to the Reading Room
A fleet of 24 cars will soon be delivering material from the stacks of the New York Public Library along the tracks of its new "book train."
Books
The Magazine that Unflinchingly Chronicled LA's Nascent Punk Scene
Most people don’t associate Los Angeles with a thriving punk scene.
Books
Skinheads, Patterned Sweaters, and Other Favorites from the NY Art Book Fair
I made the bold decision to venture into the NY Art Book Fair presented by Printed Matter at MoMA PS1. There were throngs of people examining books, chatting about books, buying books, and having books thrust upon them.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Denis Johnson's ‘Jesus’ Son’
Reflected in sentences of throbbing beauty, the blind urge to self-destruction becomes a visionary quest
Books
Testing Form: Novels by Alejandro Zambra and Matías Celedón
Solely in geographical terms, Chilean culture has issued forth from a matrix of constraint. The Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada remarked that “Chile is perhaps the most poorly located and poorly shaped nation on the planet.
Books
The Secret Life of Infrastructure: Lynn Saville’s 'Dark City'
Realism is the default mode for street photography — in New York, anyway — so it is impressive when a photographer transcends the genre by embracing the attributes and effects of a different approach.
Books
The Fantastic Fall of a Boisterous and Beloved Gilded Age Artist
In one of the many licentious anecdotes from Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering the Fantastic, the Gilded Age artist throws a party in his Gramercy Park "House of Fantasy" so raucous that his neighbors across the street — who happen to be painter George Bellows and his family — call the cops.
Books
How Photographs Have Shaped Our View of the National Parks
There were two prominent types of landscape photographs in the 1860s: Civil War battlefields strewn with the dead, and sweeping vistas of the West.
Books
The Art of Psychological Testing
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a psychological test first published in 1943, doubles as an excellent poem.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Henri Lefebvre's ‘Critique of Everyday Life’
The writings of Karl Marx will always remain a source of insight and inspiration, but vast swaths of the Marxist literature that exerted such a fascination when I was younger now seem barren of interest.
Books
A Forensic Poet for Our Time
What do you do, if you are a poet who has never “ been comfortable with autobiographical material?” Monica Youn’s poems brim with answers to this question that a younger poet might do well to notice.