When in the Course of human events….
It must have been decreed somewhere, by someone, that if you are writing your manifesto, you must purple up your prose. Self-consciousness infects the pen, and the desire to inveigh into and against the sweep of history blots heavily on the page.
We hold these truths to be self-evident…
Thomas Jefferson, commissioned by Congress to write a new nation’s founding document, must have felt no small measure of that prosaic imperative. Yet when his quill met the parchment his words didn’t lumber, they soared.
These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.
Sometimes the right wordsmith is in the right place at the right time. Tom Jefferson was many things: a patriot, a slave-holder, a country gentleman, a political operator, a genius. He served his nascent nation in a succession of roles: congressman, diplomat, cabinet secretary, vice president, and finally president. In each he’d log his due course of triumphs and shortcomings. His earliest contribution, though, might just have been his best: With the most inspired prose imaginable, he wrote America into existence.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Evolution takes time, and all that America has needed to evolve toward equality and inclusiveness is time. We’ve needed time to nurture a generation that’s willing to judge people based on who they are, versus what they look like or who they love. And we’ve needed at least as much time to retire the divisive generations who’ve come before.
A week ago we saw the Confederacy, at long last (and spurred on by the most horrific of 
valedictory EP, Metal Knight, just last year.
Dylan is, as he says, an indie author. Many of us 
Defensiveness is one thing. This…rises to another level entirely. And it went on and on, dozens of entries. Sometime in the last 24 hours or so Dylan seems to have had a moment of clarity, and deleted everything. But here’s the thing about the internet, of which you and I are painfully aware but of which Dylan Saccoccio seems startlingly ignorant: nothing goes away. Not only is his meltdown epically viral, it’s also 
Whew. Though I have my doubts that our fate as a species is dependent on one particular self-published fantasy novel, I’ll admit that I haven’t read it and should therefore withhold judgment. I have read (or tried to read) the sneak-peek available on Amazon—wordy and pretentious are pretty spot-on descriptors. Throw in not-very-well edited, and we do not have a recipe for literary success. 
Careful what you upload to Instagram. You just might wind up an inadvertent and uncompensated collaborator to serial fauxtographer, Richard Prince.
the Gagosian Gallery, consisting of poster-sized reprints of other people’s Instagram uploads, garnered without permission or attribution. They were transformed into “Prince originals” by his pithy inclusion of creepy comments, and in some cases, just an emoji or two. The photography itself (and it must be said—some of it is quite good) is purely the result of the original owners’ talent; it’s just too bad they’re not benefiting from the $90,000 price tags Prince is hanging on their work.
There are critics, mostly ones who mistake frankness for debauchery, who think that art and morality are mutually exclusive. True enough, ethics are a philosophical minefield, one much too combustible for this space. But right-minded people, which I have to think includes most of us, instinctively understand the natural law of 
Just over a year ago the Andy Warhol Museum 
alphabetically antecedent to Apple), during which he created a computer-assisted portrait of Debbie Harry—and this was, he claimed at the time, his first ever hands-on experience with a computer.
Thus for the past year the world has been in possession of Warhol digital artworks that very nearly evaded us. No one would mistake them for his best work—they’re unmistakably low-res, clearly created in the shaky, early days of the medium. They’re also unmistakably Warhol: playful, colorful, topical. Why, there’s even a 
Hat tip and thanks to online comedy purveyors 
Libraries are living institutions, and that’s as unerringly true whether they’re public lenders or personal collections. In either case they’re bound to grow, as long as people 
firstly, thank you), you surely have some awareness of their history, the meandering path they took to arrive on your shelf. They might have originated as public-library volumes or as personal property; you checked the inside covers, probably before you even purchased them, and you saw. You touched upon that history.
literature and art…
Manhattan. Was ‘Josephine’ an especially popular name there and then? Was the neighborhood predominately Italian? All I have are these sparse and captivating clues…
are stories. The books I collect found their way from someone else’s library to mine, and brought with them their own tales. It doesn’t matter much if I can decode those narratives, in whole or even in part. It just matters that they’re there.
It might be the bane of librarians, but after a certain interval 
UV light. It’s become apparent that throughout its long life, the book has been constantly amended by owners and readers, with commentary, verse, even doodles added to the margins. It is believed that the additions were assiduously scrubbed away, probably with pumice, sometime in the 16th century. But enough ink had seeped into the vellum that, although it was invisible to the naked eye, it proved to uncoverable with modern technology. Translation and study are ongoing, but thus far researches have found images of fish
and human faces (the first glimpses of which they described as “
A bonfire in Northern Ireland is an event heavy with meaning. In recent times they’ve been as sectarian as most other things in life there: Loyalists tend to hold theirs in July, using them to commemorate the 
intricately carved 
visited the Temple.
The muse presents herself exactly as she wills, and to trying to predict what inspires artists is certain folly. It’s the will o’ the wisp, inspiration is, and difficult though it is to chase and capture, that very elusiveness is the soul of its value.
