Books and Arts
“The Tao Jones Index”
Meet the Next Louis Armstrong
People uncowed by the tyranny of history should take up the jazz trumpet. Others would be smart to try another instrument—or avoid music, where the specter of the past is always looming, and seems to loom larger and larger in the Youtube era. READ MORE >>
The Trouble with Scientism
The Romance of Realism
Eisenhower in War and Peace By Jean Edward Smith (Random House, 950 pp., $40) READ MORE >>
Europe’s Other Crisis
Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation By Robert S. Leiken (Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $27.95) After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent By Walter Laqueur (Thomas Dunne Books, 322 pp., $26.99) READ MORE >>
There is a passage in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby in which David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) are lost at night in the forest of Connecticut searching for a leopard called Baby and a fox terrier named George. If you don’t know the picture, don’t bother to ask, “Why a leopard?” Your every instinct is correct—there are (and should be) no leopards in Connecticut. READ MORE >>
Over the past several months, there has been a biting back and forth over the New York Public Library’s planned renovation (the so-called Central Library Plan or CLP), which would close two midtown circulating libraries, open a circulating library within the main research library on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, and move several million books off-site to make way for new facilities. READ MORE >>
