Noteworthy reads from the last week:
"I wish I could say tonight that we are all Charlie Hedbo readers. I’m proud that for a year or two, I was."
"Here’s to a More Incredulous Age," Michelle Dean
"The man responsible for the early Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield, was more of a to-the-manor-born type. Carter expends a lot of energy describing Crowninshield as a 'cultural clairvoyant' who spent 'twenty-two roller-coaster years' atop the masthead. He was, in fact, something more of a genteel, dandyish Boston Brahmin. He just happened to see something in his world to rebel against."
"Marketing Motherhood," Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
"On any rack of women’s magazines, a number of issues are ready to inform mothers or moms-to-be on how best to carry out the vocation of motherhood."
"The Pen vs. the Gun," Philip Gourevitch
"It’s hard to imagine how the Charlie Hebdo crew would have wrung a joke out of their own executions. But you can bet that they wouldn’t have shrunk from the challenge, and you can be sure that the result would have been at odds with any standard of good taste."
"I Am Almost a Camera," Brett Busang
"It has always been the case that instead of looking at the world, painters and photographers look into it. But by the 1940s Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock openly averred that they cared nothing for replication.… Into this ferment, Richard Estes played both ends—the out and the in—against one another and came up with a captivating solution."
"Ouster of Editor Points to Challenges for Small Journals Hosted at Colleges," Peter Monaghan
"Publicity, promotion, distribution. There lie the problems, says Jay Tolson, editor of The Hedgehog Review at UVa’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture: 'There are no problems with the editorial content; the product is excellent. It should have been more aggressively promoted.'"