Tag: close attention
The Artisans Who Are Still Making Clothes in America
In 1989, the American workwear brand Carhartt produced a special clothing collection to mark its centennial. While shopping with my wife at a vintage store in New Jersey a few years ago, I came across one of these garments—a cotton-duck work jacket with a patch on the chest pocket that read 100 Years, 1889–1989. The same was stamped on each brass button. Intrigued, I took the jacket off its hanger. The inside was lined with a blanketlike fabric
How Humanism Can Save the World
One evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground.
These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. The famous dates
Did Johannes Vermeer’s Daughter Paint Some of His Best-Known Works?
F
ifteen years ago, a distinguished academic publisher brought out a densely argued, lavishly illustrated, wildly erudite monograph that seemed to completely reconceive the study of Johannes Vermeer. The author, an art historian named Benjamin Binstock, said that he had discerned the existence of an entirely new artist—Vermeer’s daughter Maria, the young woman Binstock had also identified as the likely model for Girl With a Pearl Earring—to whom he attributed seven of the 35 or so paintings then
Orhan Pamuk’s Literature of Paranoia
Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, is set mainly on Mingheria, a “fairy-tale,” “otherworldly,” and fictional Ottoman island—a “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea,” or so say the painters and tourists enchanted by its rugged mountains and its pink-stone capital, which glows when seen from afar. But behind the Orientalist fantasia lies a microcosm of empire at the point of collapse. In 1901, a bubonic plague breaks out. Pamuk will use it to expose the infirmities of
The Most Disgusting Symptom of Climate Change: Sea Snot
My first sight of it came one morning in June, as I rode the ferry through the Bosporus strait: a toxic glint on the sea’s surface. I initially thought it was oil, spilled from one of the many large container ships that pass through Istanbul via the Bosporus. Yet as we neared the glint, a sallow sludge marbled the water around the boat. In some areas, it was as thick and buoyant as fiberglass insulation. Its surface, coated with
Why the Crime Wave Is a Disaster for Progressives
In early April, Mahmood Ansari was working at his souvenir store in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when a pair of minors, one armed with a knife, robbed him. After a brief altercation, he collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was soon pronounced dead.
After Ansari’s death, I spoke with Rizwan Malik, one of his friends. Malik said that he and other business owners had unsuccessfully begged the city for additional police protection in the weeks leading up
Why Haven’t More People Seen ‘The Chosen’?
Have you heard about the hit Jesus TV show? The one that launched with a more than $10 million crowdfunding drive? And that streams for free from its own app, where the view counter has surpassed 194 million as of this writing? And that is honestly much better than I expected?
By the standards of independent media, The Chosen is a success. On Easter Sunday, 750,000 people tuned in to live-stream the Season 2 premiere; for comparison, the first episode