What?

Franco Zeffirelli on the Met’s new version of “Tosca”:
“It’s like having married a woman who’s still beautiful in your eyes, still wonderful, and for some legal reason they replace her with another one.”
Excellent. Also, as an aside, I’m still alive, now living down in D.C. with Ruth and Bonnie. Updates to follow as soon as there [...]

The Hours

Neat interactive graphic on NYT visualizing how different surveyed groups report spending their time.

Cocktail Party Circuit

An article in the Times mentions Williams in talking about colleges going trayless in dining halls:
At Williams College in western Massachusetts, the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives estimates that the college is saving 14,000 gallons of water annually since eliminating trays last spring at Driscoll, one of four campus dining halls, where 147,000 trays had been washed [...]

Spectral Bagpipes

The Utrecht school that brought you “The Steadfast Philosopher” now brings you “Alluring Bagpiper”, coming soon to the National Gallery of Art!
Start of classes has been actually pretty exciting. Last night the six majors doing art history theses sat for two hours briefing each on the work that’s been done so far. Curiously, my work [...]

Black Camelot

As if Senator Clinton’s withdrawal means the end of sexism in this campaign season (from the NYTimes style section article on Michelle Obama):
If the gumball pearls were a retro wink at traditional decorum, they still read as anything but wifely jewels. “Those are not little ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ pearls,” Ms. Taylor said. “Those are large [...]

Wide View

Lengthy profile on photographer Sze Tsung Leong in the New York Times today. He uses the traditional low-tech view camera (the type of camera that took the header image for this blog) to capture expansive, finely detailed cityscapes.

Distilled spirits are a bonanza from a tax standpoint

Awesome article in the Times on microdisilleries, cousin to the recent boom in local microbreweries across the country. Money quote:
On a farm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Jeff Quint is similarly enthusiastic about his spirits. “I’ll put our gin up against anybody’s, in any city,” he said. “Our gin rocks.”
No, dude, seriously. Wonder what they’re cooking [...]

The Pope Moves to Wichita

From this weekend’s Times Magazine article on the breakup of the Christian evangelical voting block:
Later, as a choir in stars-and-stripes neckties and scarves belted out “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a cluster of men in olive military fatigues took the stage carrying a flag. They lifted the pole to a 45-degree angle and froze in place [...]

The Long Goodbye

My mind is lousy today with thoughts of decline.
A post on NYT piqued my interest about a new book out by Alan Weisman called The World Without Us. Weisman conducted long and wide-ranging research considering the question of what would happen to our artifacts (from buildings and cities down to synthetic chemicals) if all humanity [...]

Marriage in Hopkins Forest

Lisa Graziose Corrin and Peter Erickson
Last fall, Dr. Erickson proposed on a walk. On Aug. 18, Dr. Erickson and Ms. Graziose Corrin were married by the Rev. Richard E. Spalding, a Presbyterian minister who oversees religious life at Williams, under a stand of ancient apple trees in Hopkins Forest, a reserve managed by the [...]