A brilliant ad. Robert Carlyle tells the story of Johnnie Walker. Apparently a single shot, a single take. And shot with one of the RedOne cameras.

by Daniel Mendelsohn | February 24, 2011

1.

Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness. I’m not even referring to the critical reception both in the US and abroad, which has been delirious: a recent and not atypical reference in the Times of London called it “one of the … best television series of all time,” and the show has repeatedly won the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Series. (A number of its cast members have been nominated in the various acting categories as well.) Rather, the way in which Mad Men has seemingly percolated into every corner of the popular culture—the children’s show Sesame Street has introduced a Mad Men parody, toned down, naturally, for its tender viewers—suggests that its appeal goes far beyond what dramatic satisfactions it might afford.

At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much-discussed visual style—the crisp midcentury coolness of dress and decor. The clothing retailer Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, devised a nationwide window display campaign evoking the show’s distinctive 1960s look, and now offers a style guide to help consumers look more like the show’s characters. A nail polish company now offers a Mad Men–inspired line of colors; the toy maker Mattel has released dolls based on some of the show’s characters. Most intriguingly, to my mind, Brooks Brothers has partnered with the series’s costume designer to produce a limited edition Mad Men suit—which is, in turn, based on a Brooks Brothers design of the 1960s.

Tom Shone | Winter 2010

There is nothing quite like the heat of your first summer in New York. The asphalt feels spongy underfoot. The avenues shimmer in the haze. The Union Jack handkerchief your mother insisted you pack—whoever heard of a hankie in New York!—proves no match for the sweat pooling in your eyebrows and running between your shoulder-blades. As you hop from one cloud of air conditioning to the next, peeling the shirt from your back, you feel like an animal that has chosen the wrong element in which to exist: a frog in flight, a bird underwater, an Englishman abroad. Your Union Jack hankie will double nicely as a flag of surrender.

Now it’s one of the things I most love about life in New York—along with the arctic winters, during which the city seems almost to travel back in time, the cars and roads disappearing beneath an even white blanket until there is little in your line of sight that would look out of place in a daguerreotype. You get your money’s worth with the seasons in New York. So unlike London with its single grey mono-season, interrupted by a few days of sun and a few more days of rain.

From More Intelligent Life, a publication by The Economist, three articles by three writers, all called 7 Wonders. What a lovely idea — get three well-travelled writers to pick their favourite spots.

Colin Thubron, Henning Mankell and Alex Ross were all asked to pick a city, a work of art, a journey, a hotel, a beach, a building and a view.

Marvellous.

Marvellous article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate about why you should never, ever, use two periods after a space. Many do this, and they’re the one’s who think of a computer as a typewriter on steroids. It’s not, of course. Proportional fonts don’t need two periods, it’s as simple as that.

And it looks really, really ugly.

You also don’t need underlining. Manual typewriters couldn’t do boldface and italics. They couldn’t resize or change fonts. A computer lets you do all that and more, and your average word processing program is pretty close to a true desktop publishing environment, at least to the extent it allows for far more complex formatting than was ever possible before.

By ELISSA GOOTMAN | January 7, 2011

GLIDING into Susan Hitzig and Ken Yaffe’s apartment, in a doorman building off Central Park West, Barbara Reich did not waste time ogling the obvious: the sleek kitchen, the view of the American Museum of Natural History, the sophisticated living room bearing no trace of the couple’s three children. Instead, Ms. Reich peered into a closet, where she found mismatched hangers and decreed, “This is wrong.”

Ms. Reich zoned in on a pile of books and games on the floor: “There’s no reason we should have a stack of stuff like this.” Then she got to work.

A puzzle with a missing piece? Garbage. A half-assembled Playmobil boat? Likewise. A drawer full of wooden blocks? Gone. Birthday party favors were subject to the 24-hour rule: “You let them play with it for 24 hours, then it’s garbage.” A checkers set was a recent gift from a relative, but had only black pieces. “She won’t love you any less,” Ms. Reich said as she tossed it. Then there were the notebooks, now touching artifacts, filled with the earliest handwriting of the couple’s 8-year-old son, Lucas. “Everybody’s going to learn how to read and write,” Ms. Reich said. “You don’t need the evidence.”

By BEN BRANTLEY | January 5, 2011

LADY BRACKNELL, that unbending arbiter of social correctness, would surely not approve of Brian Bedford, who portrays her in his new production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” at the American Airlines Theater.

It’s not just that Mr. Bedford, born to an English postal worker and an Irish factory weaver in a Yorkshire market town, grew up far from anywhere Lady Bracknell might consider a fashionable address. Her Ladyship, you see, likes people to fit snugly into categories, and Mr. Bedford is quite unclassifiable.

By A. G. SULZBERGER | December 29, 2010

PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.

That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

By AMANA FONTANELLA-KHAN | December 29, 2010

MUMBAI, INDIA — At Ashiesh Shah’s housewarming party in November, amid clinking champagne flutes, one of his friends joked that his apartment is actually an art gallery in disguise. Looking at the sculpture of a two-foot-long baby made of material from a spinnaker by the Canadian artist Max Streicher suspended above the staircase, any guest to his home might agree.

By SETH KUGEL | December 28, 2010

HOW much spending money should you set aside for a weekend in New York City that includes taking in some theater, museums and experimental film, dining out at restaurants for every meal and having a few beers, too?

Does $100 sound reasonable?

Perhaps not, but it should. Manhattan may seem like the most expensive place in America — you could make $10,000 disappear in a weekend if you really wanted — but it can also be cheap. Even with just $100, you can paint the town red without going into the red.

By STEPHEN WHITLOCK | Published: December 22, 2010

In London you can enjoy scones with jam and clotted cream in a genteel tearoom; in Paris, macarons on the Champs-Élysées; in Vienna, take your pick of tortes (Dobos, Sacher or linzer?) in some gilded grand cafe. But in Stockholm?

The boom in Scandinavian crime writing has done nothing to dispel the image of the Swedes as a rather dour people whose cuisine is dominated by the infamous trio of herring, meatballs and crispbread. In reality, Swedes are among the world’s most keen and discerning coffee drinkers. They also have a sweet tooth. One of the first Swedish words any new visitor learns is fika, which means a coffee break, usually enjoyed with a little cake or pastry, much like the British term elevenses but with no time restriction.

By CAROL VOGEL | Published: December 20, 2010

For nearly 60 years the portrait of a baby-faced Philip IV by Velázquez hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European paintings galleries, a stunning example of the only 110 or so known canvases by that 17th-century Spanish master. Majestic in size, it was rare in its depiction of a young, uncertain monarch and was the earliest known portrait of Philip by Velázquez, who, as the king’s court painter, went on to record his image for decades.

By RICHARD COHEN | Published: December 19, 2010

WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.

Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. … Pleasing, that idea. … As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

More gems from Rukun Advani’s derelict (no design to speak of) and desolate (no comments, no updates) blog.

In “Indian History from above and below”, Advani delivers two academic parodies (published by Kaloo for Men), swiping—and wiping—virtually all academic writing in the field of Indian history.

“Walking over Woods on an Idle Evening, or, When a Tiger Becomes a Lie-On” is another spoof in which, incredibly, Tiger Woods meets Narendra Modi.

Read on for extracts from the first. » more

A brilliant spoof, from 2009, on post-modern polemics by someone named Gautama P, and no that isn’t me. It appeared on Rukun Advani’s blog, Ticklish Subject on 13 October 2009.

Advani seems to have abandoned his blog, which is a shame because it has some lovely little nuggets.

The post-modernism post:

The following text may be read as (among many other things) a ready reckoner that any Postmodern (PoMo) subject may use to subvert the totalitarian, homogenizing discourse of a Liberal Humanist (LiHu) interlocutor. Seven polemic devices are provided - but these are by no means to be regarded as canonical.

Read on

By JANET MASLIN | Published: October 20, 2010

It is 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in the New York office of Keith Richards’s manager, a place that might look ordinary if every wall and shelf were not crammed with some of the world’s most glorious rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia. Mr. Richards has a 3 o’clock appointment. “Come on in, he’ll be here in a minute,” an assistant says — and here he comes in a minute, at 3:01. This from a man who once prided himself for operating on Keith Time, as in: the security staff ate the shepherd’s pie that Keith wanted in his dressing room? Then everyone in this packed stadium can bloody well wait. The Rolling Stones don’t play until another shepherd’s pie shows up.

Two articles, two columnists, same newspaper, same day, same page, same issue … and a vast gulf in quality. In the Indian Express today, Meghnad Desai’s Succession Politics, on the feudal nature of India’s democracy, is a thoughtful reflection on the state of the world’s largest democracy. In contrast, Tavleen Singh’s We Live In Neo-Feudal Times is utterly pedestrian and the kind of sophomoric rant that fills college papers. And it certainly doesn’t help when Ms Singh says things like “us political pundit types”. Political pundit? Who, Tavleen Singh? When did that happen? This defining moment in history seems to have escaped everyone.

A friend sent me a whole bunch of Ian Cameron’s landscapes. I can’t say I like them all — many seem overly contrived, though all are technically proficient. These are the ones that appeal most to me, chiefly because they have a mood and an atmosphere, and go beyond the chocolate box/calendar look. » more

Posterous is the niftiest of web utilities. One post, by email, via phone, whatever and it instantly updates all your services, from a website or a blog to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress, LinkedIn and everything in between. The brainchild of one Sachin Agarwal (to be married in three weeks, it seems), it is entirely intuitive. You get going in no time at all.  » more

In the last week, I’ve read in at least two places that someone is “pouring over” books or photographs or something. “Pore”, not “pour”, stupid. You pour tea. When it rains, it pours. You can’t “pour” over a book or a picture — unless you want to make it very, very wet. “To pore over”: to read or study carefully and attentively. You pore over a book while you pour tea. Get it? You have to admire the courage of these morons. It must be a wonderful life, wherever they live, that land without a dictionary or a spell-checker.

I love it. Bugger the ministers and their idiotic inaugurations of roads and bridges. A bridge had been ready for three months and was awaiting for a date from Mr Minister for a formal inauguration. This lot did the right thing. Just shoved the barricades off and started using it. Me citizen, you government = me master, you servant. Or didn’t you get the memo, Mr Minister?

You’ve got to love Inglish. Only we always “court arrest” (instead of fair damsels). Rains always “lash the city” (hear it now: whip! whip! whip!). And our netas are always air-dashing to Delhi to meet the High Command before a charge-sheeter with back-combed hair and a wheatish complexion (as opposed to Basmatish?) jumps into the “dicky” and becomes an absconder.

Someone please explain how a bandh will bring down prices of anything, especially fuel. Perhaps RajT, UdhavT & BalT, and all the other Tees of the Dubiousvilles, Soniaji G (a queen without a crown), Advaniji (a wannabe but won’t-be king), Manmohanji (uneasy lies the head that holds a turban wound by SoniajiG) and other ji-s might want to stop swanning around in gas-guzzling SUVs and motorcades.

A damp, grey Saturday morning. I took Max and Tycho out. The rain had stopped, but only just, I could still hear the soft drip of rain from the trees and the leaves. » more

AND … NDTV hits rock bottom.

On the 9 o’clock news: “what can you tell us about Dhoni’s wedding?”

“Well not much we’ve only been able to speak to the ghodiwala and he’s just come out and says the ghodi is fine and Dhoni on the ghodi will be wearing something with blue embroidery but we will be monitoring this event yes, that’s right, it’s blue, the embroidery, according to our eyewitness, the ghodiwala.”