The New Yorker, 2007-03-26

"Rembrandt's Ghost" / Simon Schama

__ Truth to nature, which for Hazlitt was "the soul of art," was, therefore, the gateway to poetic vision, not the plodding transcription of matter. ...Rembrandt as having struck the first great blow to rid art of the callow equation between optical appearance and lived experience.

"Anything Pink Rocks" / Alec Wilkinson

• The leather jacket she made for him fit so tightly that for a month, while it was adjusting to him, the jacket bruised his forearms and elbows and made his shoulders hurt.
• A slight Asian boy wearing gray jeans and a gray T-shirt stepped out of a stall. He looked like a pair of tweezers. .... Sweet Ride nodded, a kind of approval. She said, "Let me see your ass." <> Without taking his eyes from his form, the boy said disdainfully, "I don't have an ass."
• "I can't get dressed to go out without music," he said. "It doesn't happen."
• "There's a place on a dress - when I'm zipping it up for someone, it's almost the middle of the back - where the dress comes together around her," he said. "You say, 'Do you feel that?' and when they say they do you know that dress will be wrapped and out the door."
  

{Maybe it's possible to get something out of a story about Manhattan moms of young children and their playdates, but not by me.}

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