Vladimir Putin‘s op-ed in the New York Times (September 12 in the print edition) inspired reader curiosity (as well as heated online discussion, with some commenters forgetting that the opinion pages are exactly that — opinions). Public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote a blog post about how the op-ed came to be, explaining that an American…
“Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity,” which was organized by the Musée d’Orsay, the Met, and the Art Institute of Chicago, has been at the Met for a while and will close on May 27. I finally got around to seeing it this past weekend and it’s a pretty stunning exhibition. Although everyone knows that life was much…
Even under the pouring rain, Cannes is still Cannes, and the excitement is becoming palpable on this side of the pond as well. The festival opened yesterday, and in an article that I translated today for ARTINFO, journalist Damien Leblanc describes how holding umbrellas didn’t keep the crowd from cheering Leonardo DiCaprio and the cast…
Some good news for cultural preservationists and the archaeology community: a rare Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton that was illegally excavated from Mongolia, reassembled, and then auctioned off for $1.05 million at Heritage Auctions in New York City has been returned to Mongolia by U.S. officials. “We’re working with our foreign counterparts to protect heritage just as…
It is all too easy — for translators, or for anybody for that matter — to make fun of bad translations and poor command of English. But, for translators at least, we can always justify our mockery with the reasoning that we’re raising awareness about the importance of language skills and the need to rely…
Everyone knows Brooklyn is the most literary of boroughs. Case in point: last Thursday I went to a reading at Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights (a great place for browsing and the kind of used bookstore you just don’t see so much anymore, unfortunately) to hear Tom Whalen, who was my writing teacher at the New…
This is my first blog post, and it happens to fall the day after the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. war with Iraq. The anniversary has mostly passed unnoticed in Washington, according to the New York Times, and I don’t think there’s been a lot of attention in the media, either (perhaps unsurprisingly since the…