Daily Office:
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
¶ Memo to the aptly-named Patrick Hipp: when planning the secession of Gotham from New York State, do not leave the city’s watershed behind. Delaware, Ulster, Rockland and Orange Counties come with. (Water also explains how New York State as it is used to make sense.) What we love about Mr Hipp’s piece is the overall tone of just having had the idea of secession for the first time. (The Awl)
¶ It’s nice to know that the top of the art market is doing well, thanks to a “new breed” of billionaires from all over the place who share a taste for the “tried and tested.” (Guardian; via Arts Journal)
¶ From Simon Johnson’s letter to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, imploring it to make the Volcker Rule work. (The Baseline Scenario)
¶ At Bad Astronomy, Phil Platt looks at the Nile at night from a great height, and makes the best case for space travel ever.
¶ At The Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell interviews Mark Bittman. Why is it so not a surprise to learn that Mr Bittman started out in community organizing?
¶ We’re disappointed by the provincial, Middle-Kingdom-y editorial in today’s Times that calls for France and Britain to devote their new program of military cooperation to manpower, not weaponry — the better to aid our misadventure in Afghanistan.
¶ At Crawford Doyle this afternoon, we bought a copy of Wait for Me! — the memoirs of a certain dowager duchess whose doings we’ve been following for, oh, decades, ever since we read her sister’s memoir, Hons and Rebels, nearly forty years ago. Although the book has come out over here, and not just in the UK, we weren’t able to rustle up any interesting Stateside reviews. Here are two from England, the Guardian‘s surprisingly sweeter than the (still admiring) Telegraph.
¶ Justin E H Smith considers the Okies of California’s Central Valley (where he grew up) as an ethnic group. If they did the same, instead of seeing themselves, spuriously, as “Caucasian” (which means really nothing), perhaps they would have addressed their disadvantages without tumbling into Tea Party resentment. (3 Quarks Daily)
¶ Antique paper theatres. (WSJ)
¶ Portaits of the Mind. (GOOD)
¶ Tarantula Terror Study. (80 Beats)