| What Can Browne Do For You? |
[08 Jul 2015|04:20pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/07/in_search_of_sir_thomas_browne_by_hugh_aldersey_williams_reviewed.html Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th-century English physician and man of letters, has always been too varied a writer to achieve lasting literary fame. Nowadays, we’d call him an essayist—but the name just barely fits the bewildering range of topics touched by his pen. Among other things, he wrote one book on funerary practices through the ages (Urn Burial), one on gardening and mathematics (The Garden of Cyrus), one profession of faith (Religio Medici), a catalog for an imaginary museum of conjectural works of art and literature (Musaeum Clausum), and an enormous proto-encyclopedia of popular misconceptions, extravagantly titled the Pseudodoxia Epidemica. (All are available online through the University of Chicago.) His omnivorous curiosity has exiled him to a minor place in the history of literature and ideas; you can’t tell where to put him. He wrote no single masterpiece and made no major discovery.
|
|
| The Cartoonist Other Cartoonists Can’t Wait to Read |
[08 Jul 2015|08:31pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/07/ethan_rilly_s_pope_hats_reviewed.html Since 2009, when he published the first issue of his recurring comics series Pope Hats, the Canadian cartoonist Ethan Rilly has attracted fans. Like, big-deal fans, at least in the odd and rarefied world of art comics, with praise coming his way from cartoonists like Seth and Adrian Tomine. He’s won an Ignatz award and a Doug Wright Award, and he’s the kind of creator whose books other creators wait for eagerly. Reading the comics, it’s easy to see why: Rilly’s cartooning seems effortlessly evocative, each panel detailed and crisp but never stiff—there’s a real sense of actual life zipping by within each contained space. He seems like a cartoonist, as Tomine half-complimented, half-complained, “who just seems to know how to draw everything.”
|
|
| A Matter of Trust |
[08 Jul 2015|08:53pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/07/hillary_clinton_doesn_t_like_legitimate_questions_about_her_private_email.html On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton talked to CNN’s Brianna Keilar for her first national interview as a 2016 presidential candidate. The Democratic front-runner addressed some of the questions surrounding her use of a private server to house her State Department emails while she was secretary of state. The conversation wasn’t about the content of those emails as much as whether Clinton’s special ad hoc system for storing her emails—and her previous explanations about what messages she shared and what messages she deleted—were at the root of voters’ distrust of her.
|
|
| Why the Stock Meltdown Doesn’t Spell Doom for China |
[08 Jul 2015|11:35pm] |
|
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/07/china_stock_meltdown_why_its_actual_economy_will_be_just_fine.html Yale historian Jonathan Spence once famously posited that since the times of Marco Polo, the West has invariably seen China through the same lens that it sees itself. As global equity markets swoon in response to the recent meltdown in Chinese stocks, these deep-rooted biases are in play once again. The Western version of China has darkened out of fear of asset bubbles, excess investment, and debt overhangs—precisely the same imbalances that have afflicted the major economies of the developed world over the past two decades. The truth is far less bleak.
|
|