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The Forgotten Artistic Playgrounds of the 20th Century
The Playground Project explores an era of artistic play.
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“The Ephemeral Moment of Exchange” in Barbara Bloom’s Wrapping Papers
Bloom’s papers mine the histories of gift rituals, interrogate the meaning objects are endowed with as gifts, and place value on an object that is meant to be used once and then discarded.
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Reader’s Diary: Edward St. Aubyn’s ‘The Patrick Melrose Novels’ (Continued)
When I left off last week I was halfway through this quartet of low-life-in-the-midst-of-high-life novels, dissatisfied with the series’ prelude, Never Mind, but encouraged by the relative superiority of book two, Bad News.
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Illustrated Dolphins and Vampire Squid from the Dawn of Ocean Exploration
In the 16th century, Pierre Belon published one of the earliest scientific depictions of a dolphin: a woodcut with finely hatched skin and pointed teeth.
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Reader's Diary: Edward St. Aubyn's ‘The Patrick Melrose Novels’
To begin reading a contemporary novel isn’t easy, if you’re not in the habit.
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A Photographic Survey of Africa's Enduring Masquerade Traditions
From initiation rites to harvest festivals, many traditional African rituals require participants to don masks and elaborate costumes that transform their wearers into spirits, beasts, or ancestral beings.
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Martin Parr Photographs Real, Sad Food
Limp slices of bread smeared with butter, a single sausage lounging in orange soup, a presentation of pork knuckles resembling discarded brains — this is far from the stuff you'd find on the menu of your local farm-to-table eatery filled with upcycled furniture.
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Scarred Rejects from the Farm Security Administration's Great Depression Photos
Spend some time browsing the 145,000 negatives at the Library of Congress from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and an odd pattern will emerge.
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Reader's Diary: Franklin Bruno's 'Armed Forces’
I keep wondering whether it’s really possible to write at length and in depth about this kind of music.
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Beguiling Simplicity: The Poetry of Robert Lax
Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read.
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Antithetical Poetics: Recent Books by Joseph Donahue
Among contemporary American poets, Joseph Donahue is an underrecognized master. For years, he has been accumulating a prodigious body of work in which a searching vision and a refinement of craftsmanship combine.
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After 25 Years, an Influential Epistolary Novel Series Mails Its Last Letter
Griffin Moss, a lonely painter in London, and his mysterious muse Sabine Strohem were first introduced in the 1991 best-seller Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, an epistolary novel composed of extensively illustrated postcards and removable handwritten letters by author and artist