~ George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (courtesy of Tim Hulsey) ... read more
The curious influence of Samuel Moyn. How did the deceptively boyish-looking historian at Yale became a role model to a generation of young political thinkers?
And if you don’t, why you should
Hating contemporary architecture
Prosecution Futures? Multibillion Dollar Orders in Coinbase Trading Platform
Some mighty strange, and mighty big, orders in a Coinbase trading platform order book…
Adventures in the Slavic Kitchen, a book of essays with recipes, by Igor Klekh, translated by Slava I Yastremski and Michael M Naydan
As Auric Goldfinger would say, “Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.’”
Adventures in the Slavic Kitchen, a book of essays with recipes, by Igor Klekh, translated by Slava I Yastremski and Michael M Naydan
Skyscrapers and Land Values: Evidence from Chicago on the Costs of Building Tall Cities
Why “building tall” is not an answer to urban housing affordability
In The New York Times today Damien Cave looks at Australia's Amazon Book Battle, as Amazon tries to enter the famously and protectively insular market.
Good to see the local independents seem to be doing well:
In The New York Times today Damien Cave looks at Australia's Amazon Book Battle, as Amazon tries to enter the famously and protectively insular market.
Good to see the local independents seem to be doing well:
Big box stores are rare and independent bookstores are strong: Their sales accounted for around 26 percent of Australia's book business in 2015, according to Nielsen, up from 20 percent in the late 2000s, more than double the share for independents in the United States.
WHY YOU HATE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE
Australian non-fiction
- Those Wild Rabbits, by Bruce Munday
- The Honest History Book, edited by David Stephens and Alison Broinowski
- The Catch, the Story of Fishing in Australia, by Anna Clark
- A Good Life to the End, by Ken Hillman
- Maralinga’s Long Shadow: Yvonne’s story, by Christobel Mattingley
- Peak: Reinventing Middle Age, by Patricia and Don Edgar
- Looking for Rose Paterson: How Family Life Nurtured Banjo the Poet, by Jennifer Gall
- The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft, by Tom Griffiths
- The Art of War, by Betty Churcher
- Tobruk 1941, by Chester Wilmot
- Into the Heart of Tasmania, by Rebe Taylor
- Darwin (New South City Series #9), by Tess Lea
- Unearthed, the Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, by Rebe Taylor
- In Search of Hobart, by Peter Timms, read by David Baldwin
- Margaret Flockton, a fragrant memory, by Louise Wilson
- Reading the Garden, the settlement of Australia, by Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin & Kylie Mirhomamadi
- Return to Moscow, by Tony Kevin
- ‘In the dark’, from Griffith Review 55: State of Hope, edited by Julianne Schultz and Patrick Allington
- Damned Whores and God’s Police, by Anne Summers
- A Chink in a Daisy-chain, by Phil Day
- Crocs in the Cabinet, by Ben Smee and Christopher A. Walsh
- Australian Women War Reporters, Boer War to Vietnam, by Jeannine Baker
and although I haven’t quite finished writing the review: Dragon and Kangaroo, Australia and China’s shared history form the Goldfields to the present day, by Robert Macklin.
And from overseas:
- Film, A Very Short Introduction, by Michael Wood
- Spanish Literature, a Very Short Introduction, by Jo Labanyi
- The House by the Lake, by Thomas Harding
- On the Burning of Books, by Kenneth Baker
- Chinese Literature, a Very Short Introduction, by Sabina Knight
- A Land without Borders, by Nir Baram, translated by Jessica Cohen
- A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools, by Bill Laws
- German Literature, a Very Short Introduction, by Nicholas Boyle
- Cockroaches, by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump
- Italian Literature, a Very Short Introduction, by Peter Hainsworth & David Robey
And if you don’t, why you should
The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: “Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.” Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture.
Take the Tour Montparnasse, a black, slickly glass-panelled skyscraper, looming over the beautiful Paris cityscape like a giant domino waiting to fall. Parisians hated it so much that the city was subsequently forced to enact an ordinance forbidding any further skyscrapers higher than 36 meters.
Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. There’s a whole additional complex of equally unpleasant federal buildings attached to the same plaza, designed by Walter Gropius, an architect whose chuckle-inducing surname belies the utter cheerlessness of his designs. The John F. Kennedy Building, for example—featurelessly grim on the outside, infuriatingly unnavigable on the inside—is where, among other things, terrified immigrants attend their deportation hearings, and where traumatized veterans come to apply for benefits. Such an inhospitable building sends a very clear message, which is: the government wants its lowly supplicants to feel confused, alienated, and afraid.
