The SkyTrain, Vancouver’s current rail transit system, first went into service 40 years ago. Several promotional shorts made in the run-up to its opening are available to view on Youtube, the most elaborate of which is “Goin’ to Town.” Produced not long before the opening of SkyTrain’s first line, itself scheduled not long before the […]
Berlin, one often hears, is not Germany. Since only four or five percent of the country’s population lives there, that makes a kind of sense. But Berlin also happens to be Germany’s largest city by a fairly wide margin: the second-largest, Hamburg, has at least 1.5 million fewer people; less populated still are Munich, Cologne, […]
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, one genre of occasionally viral post involves images or videos of American phenomena that “the European mind cannot comprehend.” Recent examples turned up in a search include a morbidly obese old-west cosplayer winning some kind of contest at a shooting range; a man using a flamethrower […]
American cities are retarded. Perhaps that sentiment could stand to be further explained. I use American in the most casual sense, in reference not to the continents but to the United States of America in particular; I use retarded in the most literal sense, in reference to a progress being hindered or halted. Keeping those […]
“Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form?” once asked economist Tyler Cowen in a post on his long-running blog Marginal Revolution. He went on to give his own answer: “I am.” The context was one of his […]
Edmund White died this past summer at the age of 85, having lived about four decades longer than he must once have expected to. His HIV diagnosis came in 1985, around the height of the AIDS epidemic, when he was in his mid-forties. It can’t have been a complete surprise, given that he’d spent most […]
You’ve almost certainly seen Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker cover illustration View of the World from 9th Avenue, whether or not you read the New Yorker — and indeed, whether or not you were alive in 1976. Lower Manhattan dominates the image; beyond the Hudson river, all dissolves into near-abstraction, labeled only by a handful […]
“Can’t overstate how much everyone must go see La grande bellezza,” Ferdinand Addis tweeted in September of 2013. “I want to spend the rest of my life staring at Toni Servillo’s forehead.” At that time, he was most widely known — to the extent that he was known to the public at all — as […]
As you’d expect from a cultural figure who moves in the international music and art worlds — while running a record label called Todo Mundo — David Byrne travels a lot. What’s more notable is that, when he arrives in each world capital that requests his presence, he gets around on a bicycle. Sometimes he […]
The late Pope Francis may have been the most quotable head of the Catholic Church in living memory. His line about how “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” certainly had a way of making the rounds every few years on Twitter. Another of his […]