Reviews and News:
Buy Michelangelo’s Italian villa for $9 million (or just look at the pictures).
In praise of children’s books: “There’s something almost magical about reading a children’s book when you reach adulthood.”
Renoir’s onions: “In them, one can see in a flash what Meyer Schapiro meant when he called still-life painting part of ‘a democratizing trend in art that gives a positive significance to the everyday world.’ And yet, I say Renoir’s portrait of onions because nothing could be less still than this so-called still life—one of the treasures of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts—with its astonishing sense of movement.”
The right way to visit Paris is to walk it: “A new book from two long-time expats and Paris insiders revolves around the idea that the best way to see Paris is to do as the locals do and explore it on foot. Paris in Stride is part walking guide, part visual exploration of the city’s charms, and part argument that visitors can discover the city with the laid-back curiosity of longtime residents.”
Only known edition of Ben Jonson’s annotated plays has been purchased by the University of Edinburgh: “Printed in 1640 – around 30 years after Epicene was first performed, and three years after the death of the English playwright – the collection of Jonson’s plays, titled The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, was placed on the market last year. An overseas buyer had placed an offer on the collection, but its cultural significance meant that an export bar was imposed on the book by the UK government, with British libraries given the opportunity to acquire it first if they could meet the purchase price of £48,000.”
Branch Davidians are still meeting for Bible study 25 years after the Waco siege.
Essay of the Day:
“In June 2010, Bill Ewasko traveled alone from his home in suburban Atlanta to Joshua Tree National Park, where he planned to hike for several days.” He never returned. In The New York Times Magazine, Geoff Manaugh writes about the search and the rise of amateur sleuths in missing person cases:
“Stretching west from Juniper Flats, where Ewasko’s car was spotted, is an old, unpaved road that begins with little promise of an eventful hike; chilling winds whip down from the flanks of Quail Mountain, and the park’s famous boulder fields are nowhere near. But as the dirt road continues, hikers are confronted by cascading decision points — places where the trail diverges at junctions with other trails or where it crosses a wash or dry streambed. As they compound over time, these minor decisions give rise to radically different situations: an exposed cliff instead of a secluded valley, say, or a rattlesnake-filled canyon instead of a quiet plain.
“Anticipating what a stranger will do when confronted with decision points in an unfamiliar landscape is part of any search-and-rescue operation. In recent years, technology — in the form of what are called lost-person-behavior algorithms — has been brought to bear on the problem. Some of the most widely used algorithms are those developed by the Virginia-based search-and-rescue expert Robert Koester, who wrote the definitive book on the subject, ‘Lost Person Behavior.’ ‘The basic premise,’ Koester told me, ‘is that the past predicts the future. While you can never pinpoint exactly where you think the missing person you’re looking for is going to be located — if you could, it would be a rescue, not a search — by looking at enough previous cases that are similar, you can build a statistical model that identifies the most likely locations.’
“Koester explained to me, many lost hikers believe they are headed in the right direction until it’s too late. An animal trail that resembles a new branch of the path might divert downhill to a stream, for example, before winding onward through a series of ravines, ending at a dry wash — but by then an hour or more has gone by, and the path forward is now nowhere to be seen. Worse, Koester said, simply turning around can be impossible, as the route back is camouflaged by rocks or brush. The hiker is lost.”
Photo: Vaduz
Poem: Adam Kirsch, “Two Poems”
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