Many officials “saw the roundabout as a kind of fashionable object,” said Éric Alonzo, a professor at the École d’architecture de la ville & des territoires in suburban Paris who has written a book on traffic circles.
“I heard from technicians who weren’t necessarily recommending that solution,” he said, “but elected officials were saying, ‘I want one.’”
For others, roundabouts are a constant reminder of an overreliance on cars and have come to symbolize deeper worries about French cultural identity, as urban sprawl and giant malls suck the life out of city centers, killing traditional bakers and butchers.
“I don’t remember ever thinking they were funny,” Ira Glass writes in a new anthology of writing about the quintessential American comic strip. “Who ever laughed at ‘Peanuts’?”
But Glass writes this in the context of his deep love for Charlie Brown and company. It’s just that instead of finding much humor in their stories, he enjoyed the comfort they provided to a “sulky little kid” who thought of himself as “a loser and a loner.”
“The Peanuts Papers” hammers home that fully appreciating Charles M. Schulz’s juggernaut, which ran in newspapers from 1950 to 2000, requires looking aslant at its genre. It is, as John Updike once described it, a “comic strip at bottom tragic.” This collection of deeply personal essays will help you see it clear, if you don’t already, as a psychologically complex epic about stoicism, faith and other approaches to existential struggles.
Imagine for a moment that the World Republic of Letters had a library. Now imagine that the librarians who selected, distributed, and in some cases produced the books circulating among the patrons were a loose confederation of Marxist professors, publishing lobbyists, and government bureaucrats from every nation on earth. Upon what common ground might such an institution build its foundation? From what raw materials might they select its keystone, such that it bears the load of its design and does not collapse, immediately, in some spectacular catastrophe?
It’s difficult to imagine the labor that could bring such a colossus into the world, but what’s more surprising: that it can be made, or that it could be unmade?