Looking Back at Lewis and Clark

Looking Back at Lewis and Clark

History is usually written in the third person, even though it has to be lived in the first, and Fehrman takes advantage of the rich and deep documentation of the Lewis and Clark expedition to try to reconcile the discrepancy. The book adopts the perspectives not only of Lewis and of Clark but also of…

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What Dogs See When They Look at Us

What Dogs See When They Look at Us

Laqueur takes the reader on a nearly encyclopedic trip through this truth and its consequences, ranging from Giotto’s dogs—calm, disengaged witnesses to holy stories (“At a foundational moment of Western art,” he says, “there is the dog doing what dogs do”)—to Bruegel the Elder’s massed and happy hunting hounds in winter, whose barks we can…

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Cote and the Risks of the Clubstaurant

Cote and the Risks of the Clubstaurant

The restaurateur Simon Kim opened Cote in the Flatiron district, in 2017, with an alluring conceit: a marriage of two of the great beef-worshipping restaurant genres, the Korean-barbecue joint and the American steak house. He borrowed Cote’s format from the former, with grills inset into tabletops and a classic Korean menu of meat, marinades, and…

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How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition

How Raghu Rai Captured an India in Transition

That picture, “Burial of an Unknown Child,” became the defining image of the disaster, a depiction of tragedy so viscerally infused with loss that, even today, it appears on banners protesting the chemical company responsible, which has yet to make full amends for the incident. “Burial” is one of dozens of photos that Rai, who…

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The Verve and Confrontation of Lisa Yuskavage’s Naked Ladies

The Verve and Confrontation of Lisa Yuskavage’s Naked Ladies

The history of art is littered with naked ladies, of course, from Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” to Ingres’s “Grande Odalisque” to Picasso’s “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair,” but Yuskavage’s ladies are, indeed, of a particular kind, and could quite easily be taken for what the artist’s husband, Matvey Levenstein, jokingly called “stroke material for…

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What Jack Kerouac Left Behind

What Jack Kerouac Left Behind

Six months later, in February, 1943, most of the men Jack sailed with that summer—including Glory and the pastry chef—were killed when the Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat. More than six hundred people died. Jack was so shattered by the news that his hands shook for weeks afterward. I remember him wearing the…

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