Arts & Design

In a summer filled with news of the election in the United States, global terrorism, and Brexit, the swift resignation on July 24^th of Nepal’s Prime Minister, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, hardly made the headlines. The only two news sources reporting on the event outside of Asia — Al Jazeera and the New York Times — also produced somewhat dissimilar commentaries. The New York Times framed the resignation in the context of party politics, the challenges of running a multi-coalitional government, growing demands for federation, and geopolitical tensions with Nepal’s powerful neighbors, India and China. The Al Jazeera report also associated the resignation with demands for constitutional reforms and federalization, but the commentary largely focused on the numerous street protests that had been disrupting daily life in Kathmandu since Oli’s ascent to power in October 2015. …

An exhibition now touring several cities in Europe is worth visiting and thinking about, as it reflects both the political and cultural sensibility of Europe. PIGS is curated by Blanca de la Torre, a Spanish art curator who develops projects throughout the world and understands art as a social tool to disclose political injustices and prejudices. The “pigs” to which this exhibition refers are not simply the four countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain) …

In urban planning, there’s a strategy known as “hostile” or “defensive” architecture, such as the metal spikes built into public ledges to keep people (particularly those who are homeless) from sitting on them. Similarly, a 2013 article in the New York Times described what it called “pocket parks.” After becoming alarmed at the presence of men walking around with GPS monitors around their ankles, residents and city officials of a Los Angeles neighborhood found that the easiest way to drive away sex offenders was to build tiny playgrounds — or rather, plots of land with often no more than a swing set — just enough to invoke a state law that forbids registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or a park. 

Along the Limmat River in Zürich, the Swissmill building is in operation at full clip around the clock. Originally a textile factory, the site at Sihlquai was converted to a grain mill in 1843. By 1876 it was considered the most modern milling facility on the European continent with its use of chilled cast iron rollers for cracking open wheat grain and separating the outer layer of bran. Now a patchwork of buildings that harken back to different eras of growth and expansion, the Stadtmühle  (or City Mill) exterior conceals a complex, digitally controlled high-tech organism that vibrates with the mechanical rhythms of modern production.   …

Who is Joan Didion anyway? In The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty decided to find the writer in her most public work. “Does the life reveal the art, the art the life?” he asks in the prologue (xxiii). If you find fault with The Last Love Song it will be in this decision — not in Daugherty’s entertaining style, which often reads like the New Journalism that Didion helped to establish; nor in his …

One seeks in vain for references to Shakespeare in Carly Fiorina’s Tough Choices: A Memoir (2007) and Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey (2015). There are no lessons from Shakespeare in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (1996). Nor are there any in her more recent books …