Marlow’s Listener

Ben Bernacke, Tim Geitner and Sheila Bair are still in office, but Hank (the “Tank”) Paulson is on the beach and the newly published author of this inside-the-Beltway first-person I-was-there.

So, what do you get the man who has everything? We can safely assume that Paulson, the CEO of Goldman Sachs at the time, was well [...]

When I was a boy, the old man interrupted, life was simple.
When you were a boy, his wife said, you were simple.
Yes, I always had a goal. Always a goal. When I was a little boy, to be a big boy.
When I was a big boy, to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, [...]

In Your Hands Adam Clayton Powell

When you have eighty-seven-year-old eyes, there is always a haze. But the eyes of my soul at that moment could see the Lincoln Memorial and the ears of my soul could hear Martin’s voice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial summoning the nation to move out of the low land of race and [...]

I spent a summer tattoing Karner Blue butterflies in 1978.
Lycaeides melissa samuelis(Nabokov) (see this current summary and this more impassioned treatment) is a Disney-cute thumbnail size blue butterfly with gold dots (or no gold dots, depending on sex.). The (Nabokov) is the Nabokov, who was a mean leopidopterist was well as a dazzling [...]

The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has written about the Bauhaus student Marcel Breuer that ‘The late furniture sculptor and theoretician Scott Burton declared that Breuer’s club chair, designed in 1925, is at least as important a work of modern art as the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon.’ Once you have entertained that idea, it’s hard to [...]

Here, unlike when I am in England–and escaped from what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘the Bastille of civilisation’–I find it no hardship to rise with the sun and pick my way through the boobyalla for a barefoot tramp on the sand.