Via Eric Alterman, an excellent paper from the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on why Saddam can be contained without going to war.

The NY Times Magazine has some wonderful essays this week, about people who died in 2002:

• Tony Kushner on Geraldine of Albania & Lucia Pamela
  
• A letter from Jimi Hendrix to his father — before he was famous
  
• David Rakoff on Edith Bouvier Beale — of Grey Gardens fame
  
• Armistead Maupin on Harry Hay
  
• Ann Patchett on Eileen Farrell — an opera diva who lived with her NYPD husband on Staten Island
  
• Anthony Giardina on Stephen Ambrose — notable for taking the historian to task for glorifying war, and thus making new ones more likely
  
• Plus, a beautiful “What They Were Thinking” with Arthur Miller with a photo taken by his late wife, Inge Morath</p> </ul>

1% of Americans are worth at least $1 million. What percentage of incoming members of Congress are millionaires? 43%.

Spotted, standing in line at the West 18th Street Post Office: Wallace Shawn

Heard, while shopping for used CDs at Academy: “She had the prettiest mudflaps I ever saw” — a line from a country music song

I haven’t really found other blogs, other than Andy’s Chest, that talk about art, theatre, and other cultural goings-on in NYC with any regularity. Some of the art people I know have blogs, but don’t like to mix their blogging with their “areas of business”.

Send me some suggestions! I’m looking for others to give me recommendations on art galleries, books, theatre, music, etc. I can’t do it all myself.

Non-NYC ones are OK too.

This is one of the best things I’ve ever read about gym culture, from The Economist’s year-end issue.

When I saw this photo today illustrating a NY Times article on robots, I thought it was Glenn for a second. Actuallly, the picture looks better in the newspaper, and Glenn is of course more sexy.

I’m in the middle of a fascinating book, titled Parallels and Paradoxes. It consists of a series of conversations between Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said on music, culture, and politics. A sample, from Barenboim:

I still think the greatest sense of isolation and removal from anything, for me — but this is very subjective, and I do not claim this to be objective — is in late Beethoven. If you look at the Grosse Fugue, you look at passages of the Missa Solemnis, and you look at the Diabelli Variations or the last three piano sonatas, this is total isolation and removal from the world, much more so than Schoenberg.

From the NY Times Science section, a very interesting article on why religion ‘evolved’ in human societies.

This is about constitutional democracy, which we pretend is still important, right?

From Alas, a Blog