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A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.
Matt and Sam explore the “crisis of masculinity” in America through books on the subject by Senator Josh Hawley and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer to license her book, “Love in the Library,” on the condition that she edit her author’s note to remove a description of past and present instances of racism.
Last March I fell in love with riding a bicycle, and since then, I’ve blogged about my adventures here and there.
A batch of thoughts and things I’ve learned off the top of my head, many inspired by Grant Petersen’s Just Ride and Bicycle Sentences, which have a kind of punk, unfussy ethos that meshes with my own:
1. If you’re new to biking, just go to the bike shop and try out some bikes and buy whatever’s in your budget. Don’t fuss over it too much. After six months of riding you’ll know what you really need and want.
2. Better to ride up a hill than to ride into the wind. You’ll overtake the hill eventually, but you can’t overtake the wind. Also: Everywhere seems flat until you try to bike it. There is no flat. (Kevin Kelly said this to me.)
3. Get a basket or a pannier. I always ride with one of my bags now. You never know what you’ll want to pick up when you’re out riding. Biking is this perfect pace between walking and driving — you take in more than you would walking, but it’s still easy to spot things and stop and investigate.
4. Start a bike gang. It will make you happy. Easiest way to do this is start riding regularly — taking off at the same time and place — with one other person. Pretty soon you’ll have a gang. Give your bike gang a stupid name. My bike gang is called The Turtles, because our sensei, Hank, aka Master Splinter, who is 75, always says, “Off like a herd of turtles!”
5. A two-hour ride is plenty long. Anything longer than that is vanity and wankery and needs to be broken up with lunch or beers. Better for a ride to be too short than too long.
6. If your friend asks you if you want to ride, drop everything, if you can, and go out. Always worth it. Some of the best rides I’ve had were with my pal Marty in the middle of the afternoon when we probably should’ve been working.
7. I don’t know what it is about men, but two men can ride and have an intimate conversation with each other, but 3 quickly becomes a locker room, somehow, unless somebody’s being left out. (I like to ride in the back when we have 3, it’s like having ambient chatter and camaraderie, but I can withdraw into my thoughts a bit.) Even numbers, like 4 riders, means you can pair up and have conversations.
8. Keep a bike that you can hop on without much fuss so you can go out for short rides whenever you want. It’s nice to have a simple, fun, extra toy-like bike for errands and joy rides.
9. Look out for dogs, children, and Lexuses. All wildly unpredictable.
10. Riding a bicycle is a beautiful paradox — it requires you to become one with the machine while also making you feel more human.
I probably have more that I’ll remember the minute I hit “publish” on this post, but that feels like enough for now.
Nobody said it better than Mark Twain: “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
Happy riding.
My bike gang calls ourselves “The Turtles” so this is extra meaningful to me ? ? https://t.co/sLUHtz1IuG
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 27, 2023
Shanghai’s Fiu Gallery welcomes visitors to experience life in London – roughly 5,700 miles away. Contemporary British artist Peter Judson’s Wonder Around East London exhibition stays true to his playful, colorful, energetic style. Daily objects are transformed into “visual energy” that Judson uses to innovate and explore further, extending lightness, liveliness, and joy to visitors.
In Wonder Around East London, Judson hopes the audience can shift their focus from the functionality of the objects to the beauty of the artwork itself. “There are two things I want to express, and I also want the show to work on two levels. Firstly, to create an aesthetically punchy and interactive experience that can be enjoyed by all. Secondly, I wanted the show to act as a catalyst to a way of thinking,” shared Judson. “Observation is so profoundly linked with conscious and subconscious assumptions. I wanted to use color, abstraction, reduction, and scale as a way to break these assumptions and try to force the audience to view the world around us in a new context.”
The ultimate takeaway is quite simple: “I would love it if anyone leaving the show were to walk home and begin to see the city they live in in a new way. To spot some minute detail they may have normally not noticed and appreciate it regardless of context. To see the object in isolation and maybe find a new appreciation for the world that we live in.”
To learn more about Wonder Around East London, visit peterjudson.com.
Peter Doig, Canal Painting, 2022–2023, on the cover of issue no. 243. © Peter Doig. Courtesy of the artist and TRAMPS; photograph by Prudence Cuming.
For the cover of our seventieth-anniversary issue, we commissioned a painting by the artist Peter Doig, of a boy eating his breakfast beside a London canal. Our contributing editor Matthew Higgs spoke with Doig about his influences and fried eggs.
INTERVIEWER
How did the cover image come about?
PETER DOIG
I’d made a birthday card for my son Locker—a more cartoony version of what became the painting. I quite liked the subject: he’s sitting at a café on the towpath of the canal in East London. Everyone who knows London knows the canal—we take it for granted. I can’t think of any paintings of it, but it seems to me a sort of classic painting subject.
I started working on the image alongside a big painting I was making for an exhibition at the Courtauld. I was thinking about how my work relates to the Impressionist galleries there, which contain Cézanne, Gauguin, Daumier, Van Gogh, Seurat, et cetera. I had begun many of the paintings before I was invited to make the exhibition, but most of them had a long, long way to go before being finished. I’d brought all my paintings to my London studio from New York and Trinidad, and all of a sudden I had more paintings in progress than I think I’d had in probably thirty-odd years. It was quite exciting in a way, but then I had to make an edit, to decide which ones I was going to concentrate on, because I was getting carried away and I was never going to finish everything. The canal painting was the one very, very new one. That’s why I liked it for the Review—and because, although I thought of the image as very much a London painting, somehow after I made it I was reminded of Paris, and of French painting more than of English painting.
INTERVIEWER
Is it important that the viewer knows the boy is your son?
DOIG
Perhaps for people who know him. I’ve got quite a large family, and so it’s important to me that when I make a painting that depicts one of my children, the others can relate to it and feel that they understand why I did it. In the painting of Locker, I wanted to capture a person at that stage in life, the way Cézanne did when he used his son as a model. Another one of the paintings in the Courtauld exhibition features my daughter Alice in a hammock surrounded by greenery. I began working on the painting in 2014—I know that because I recently found a photograph of Alice standing in her primary school uniform looking at it when I very first started it. I finished it this year in my studio in just a few hours, after having returned to it after all those years. One of my other kids saw it and said that I had absolutely captured Alice at that age. That’s why I left it not quite finished, with translucent tones—I wanted it to feel almost ghostly. She’s now a grown woman, and it captures the passage of time.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the significance of the canal?
DOIG
The canal, up until fairly recently, was a place of dread. After the industrial revolution, the canal no longer served the buildings on it, so for a long time stepping onto the towpath at night meant risking a mugging or worse. That has changed and is changing. The painting’s setting is a real café very close to where we live at present, and where I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few years, looking westward at the view through the bridge. Sitting there I realized how beautiful it is, and how much like a painting it is already. I also thought of paintings by Manet and others—paintings of railways and train stations, with figures in the foreground.
INTERVIEWER
The Impressionists painted some of the earliest depictions of what we understand as modernity.
DOIG
I was looking at Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Behind the girl at the bar, there are two globes in the background, two spheres. It’s not obvious at first, but they are electrical lights, and Manet painted them in very, very sharp focus, whereas everything else in the painting is quite blurred. I suppose at the time Manet made the painting the viewer would have been really surprised by this very modern element entering a work of art. In my painting, the eggs are a bit like that—in a way, the eggs are the most contemporary thing in the painting.
Matthew Higgs is a contributing editor of The Paris Review.
After writing about discovering the magic of Roget’s Thesaurus, I started getting really interested in what reference books writers keep near their desk.
What I did not anticipate is this photo of Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford with his MacBook and a big stack of reference books:
From his Fresh Air interview:
I love the English language. My favorite book is a thesaurus, you know. I’m constantly looking to find words and language that some bands would maybe hesitate to use or they’re not able to because of the arena that they work in.
In his memoir, Confess, Halford writes about Roget’s Thesaurus being “worth its weight in gold!” and bringing it into the studio with him:
When I wasn’t recording vocals, I was low-profile in the studio and usually sitting on my own in the corner, studying hard from a book. Roger was obviously curious, and after a few days he wandered over to have a word with me.
“You’re very engrossed in that book, Rob,” he noted. “Is it a… Bible?”
“Hardly!” I laughed, showing him the book. “It’s Roget’s Thesaurus!” Roger looked pretty relieved.
Mr. Roget and I were coming up trumps. I have always been keen to widen my songwriting vocabulary and still have that same tome today.
He writes more in Biblical:
I have a book that is very dear to my heart. It’s forty-five years old, but it’s in extremely good nick for its age. Published in 1977, it’s my well-thumbed copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and it has helped me to write the lyrics for every single Judas Priest album from Sin After Sin onward.
What you need to write a hit, Halford says, is “paper, pencil and a good Thesaurus.”
Hell yeah! (Big thanks to my pal Julien.)
The folks at City Lights recorded my recent interview with Peter Turchi and posted it to YouTube. I enjoyed it very much. (The last time we spoke was 2015!)
In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.
“We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,” writes Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendell. “But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.”
Read it here.
In January 2021, after a sleepover with her best friend, 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir got onto an e-bike in her Los Angeles neighborhood, crashed, and died. Who was responsible for the tragedy? Molly’s parents have sued Rad Power Bikes, a popular e-bike manufacturer. Author Peter Flax examines the thorny legal questions at the heart of the lawsuit and illuminates the potential pitfalls of the e-bike industry’s explosive, largely unregulated growth, in part by speaking with other Rad Power Bike users who, like Flax, have experienced worrying equipment problems:
I started talking to my neighbors. During the pandemic, hundreds of teenagers in my community took to the streets on RadRunners and other inexpensive DTC e-bikes with mechanical disc brakes, and I discovered that many of them were having similar issues. Some parents were clued into the problem and were either scheduling regular maintenance with local shops or learning how to make the fixes at home, while others had no idea that their kids were riding heavy electric bikes that couldn’t stop properly without frequent maintenance. I started a thread on Nextdoor with a summary of the problem and how to address it, and soon I was DMing with parents who wanted tips on barrel and caliper adjustments.
One of my neighbors — his name is Ezra Holland and he lives about five blocks from me — says that almost immediately he started noticing disturbing braking issues with the RadRunner he purchased early in 2022. Two or three weeks after he got it, Holland, an experienced road cyclist, noticed that the responsiveness of the brakes was poor, and he decided to remedy the problem by tightening the cables that run from the levers to the calipers. But he learned that this only bought him a few weeks, and that after tightening those cables a few times, one of the calipers clicked into a different position where there was zero braking action. “That is pretty scary,” he says.
Thus began a year of education, vigilance, maintenance, and communication with Rad. Holland now buys pads in bulk on Amazon; he checks and adjusts both calipers every two weeks, always on alert for a failure. He’s experienced the rear brake fail going downhill and is especially concerned about that happening while his 17-year-old is using the bike. Rad has sent him new brakes and new pads, but Holland says that in his ongoing phone calls with the brand, customer service reps and supervisors have told him that other customers aren’t experiencing braking issues like he has. But he alone knows a half dozen friends and neighbors struggling with the same problems. “I just got to a point where I started questioning my own thinking, because they keep saying I’m wrong,” he says. “I start thinking that maybe I’m just making a fuss here for no reason. Which I think is not fair, because I think it’s not true.”
FreshRSS 