“‘What pleases the PUBLIC is always what’s most banal,’ he wrote to his brother in 1883. But nowadays Van Gogh pleases the public enormously. So has he become banal?” Julian Barnes reflects on Van Gogh’s life and work and how our perception of him has changed over time in a London Review of Books podcast. Interested in contemporary art? Check out our own Bill Morris’s piece on the Whitney Museum.
Seeing Van Gogh
The Ice Heats Up
You Must Go and Win author Alina Simone‘s essay “Why Do Russians Hate Ice?” has caused quite an uproar in the comments section.
El Presidente
Following the death of Hugo Chavez, the publishing industry is gearing up to provide retrospectives of his life. At the Christian Science Monitor, Whitney Eulich reviews Comandante, a book that claims Chavez was “this close” to becoming a dictator.
Fanged
If you’re wondering why you should read this new essay on Jack London, consider this sentence: “Born in 1876, the year of Little Bighorn and Custer’s Last Stand, the prolific writer would die in the year John T. Thompson invented the submachine gun.” In Smithsonian Magazine, Kenneth Brandt explores the brief life of the author.