The word “salon,” for a starry convocation of creative types, intelligentsia, and patrons, has never firmly penetrated English. It retains a pair of transatlantic wet feet from the phenomenon’s storied annals, chiefly in France, since the eighteenth century. So it was that the all-time most glamorous and consequential American instance, thriving in New York between 1915 and 1920, centered on Europeans in temporary flight from the miseries of the First World War. Their hosts were Walter Arensberg, a Pittsburgh steel heir, and his wife, Louise Stevens, an even wealthier Massachusetts textile-industry legatee. The couple had been thunderstruck by the 1913 Armory Show of international contemporary art, which exposed Americans to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and, in particular, Marcel Duchamp. Made the previous year, his painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” a cunning mashup of Cubism and Futurism, with its title hand-lettered along the bottom, was the event’s prime sensation: at once insinuating indecency and making it hard to perceive, what with the image’s scalloped planes, which a Times critic jovially likened to “an explosion in a shingle factory.”
Today, the view from, and out of, nowhere is common fare among philosophers when they seek to develop knockout, universal arguments. Curiously, though, they do not probe into the origins of the view from nowhere. As a result, they fail to see that its claims to objectivity are rooted in unexamined biases. This view began in modern Europe in a world dominated by colonial and imperial practices, where European philosophers thought that they alone could take up a standpoint that was removed from events unfolding on the ground. They alone could pursue philosophy as a science, and not a way of life.
This begets a wilful ignorance of world philosophies that is built into the model of what it means to practise academic philosophy
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s new novel, “Glory,” a nation riven by decades of autocratic rule finds itself dividing once again. Seeking “to forget the screaming in their heads,” the citizens of Jidada flock to the Internet. Safe inside this “Other Country,” they rage against their government in ways that would be unthinkable in the physical “Country Country,” where cancellation is truly final.
The gulf between the world as it is and the world as it could be is as wide in Bulawayo’s novel as it is outside it. The actions depicted in the book are so familiar, the events so recognizable, the pain so acute, it’s easy to see how “Glory” began as a work of nonfiction. That the characters are animals — furred, feathered, scaled and all — is almost incidental.
A futuristic crime novel tells us just what we don't want to hear: that human nature in its rawest form doesn't change. Greed, lust for sex and material wealth, and the unending pursuit of power all live large four decades from now in this new installment of the Eve Dallas detective series set in 2063.
A love story, a ghost story, a thriller: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant first novel embraces elements of multiple genres, binding them through incantatory language steeped in the rhythms, fables and spirituality of her Trinidadian homeland.
Deep time is, to me, one of the most awe-inspiring concepts to come out of the earth sciences. Getting to grips with the incomprehensibly vast stretches of time over which geological processes play out is not easy. We are, in the words of geologist Marcia Bjornerud, naturally chronophobic. In Notes from Deep Time, author Helen Gordon presents a diverse and fascinating collection of essay-length chapters that give 16 different answers to the question: “What do we talk about when we talk about deep time?” This is one of those books whose title is very appropriate.
It’s tempting for readers to interpret the book as just memories of a more innocent, less instant age. But Klosterman does a good job putting everything in its place. “Times change, because that’s what times do,” he writes.
“The Organization Man” made Whyte famous but, as Mr. Rein’s title suggests, he spent most of his career analyzing how cities work. Over the four decades between when he left Fortune and his death in 1999, Whyte thought about how to preserve open countryside and historic buildings while encouraging lively urban spaces. Under the patronage of Laurance Rockefeller, he probed the assumptions behind city plans, often arguing for the opposite conclusion. Too much open space could be as great a problem as too little. “Open space, like development, needs the discipline of function,” he wrote. Public places didn’t get overcrowded if they offered places to sit. They were underused if they didn’t. People, wrote Whyte, “determine the level of crowding, and they do it very well.”