Daily Office: Wednesday
¶ Matins: Despite our inclination to hold up to a bright light everything that David Brooks writes in the Times, searching for telltale signs of inauthenticity, we have to admit that his analysis of “The Populist Addiction” is spot on, and nowhere more so than in the following observation.
The idea that the American “élite” is an undivided bloc is nothing but lazy demagoguery. Look high enough, and you find a million “teams” of one. (NYT)
¶ Lauds: Cleveland Plain Dealer critic Steven Litt exhorts the local Museum of Art to do a better job of mounting touring exhibitions. (via Arts Journal)
¶ Prime: The $5.4 billion sale of Stuyvesant Town and adjacent Peter Cooper Village to a a consortium of investors three years ago was both stupid and wrong. Stupid because what has happened since was obviously going to happen, and wrong because the transformation of a large middle-class enclave into Manhattan into more exclusive housing would be altogether indefensible; it’s bad enough that not much is being done to work transformations in the opposite direction. We can only rejoice at this news. And we can only hope that Mayor Bloomberg will regard this fiasco as his biggest fumble. (NYT)
¶ Tierce: Yikes! Donald MacKenzie reports, at Short Sharp Science: “Introducing Botox, bioweapon of mass destruction.”
¶ Sext: This time, Dave Bry’s Public Apology seems, innocently enough, to be directed more at himself than at the latest alleged victim of his general reprehensibleness. We’re not sure that poor old Tubby was taken in. (The Awl)
¶ Nones: George Packer writes stirringly of the dodginess of Dresden’s restoration, from firebombed ruin to “Baroque fantasia.” (The New Yorker)
¶ Vespers: The enthusiasm in Adam Gallari’s write-up of Albanian writer Ornela Vorpsi’s The Country Where No One Ever Died is extremely infectious. (The Rumpus)
¶ Compline: Felix Salmon is at Davos, where he despairs of hearing any long-overdo ‘splainin‘. (Not to worry: Davos is irrelevant to non-attendees.)