Auguste Rodin's Hand of God (1896)

[Scala Archives]

Columbia !!!!!!!!

Brooklyn Flea at the former Williamsburg Savings Bank

Gorgeous building, people, and trinkets. We found the most treasure in the basement, but I think the key is to go early on Saturday mornings -- before everything is picked over. 

Asking Too Much by Andrea Gibson

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. 
Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. 
Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. 
Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mothers name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. 
See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. 
Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? 
And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? 
Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? 
And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? 
Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? 
Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad?
Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? 
See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. 
And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mothers joy when she spoke it for the very first time. 
I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. 
Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. 
Tell me—knowing I often picture Gandhi at ten years old beating up little boys at school. 
If you were walking by a chemical plant, where smoke stacks were filling the sky with dark, black clouds, would you holler, “Poison! Poison! Poison!” really loud or would whisper, “That cloud looks like a fish, and that cloud looks like a fairy”? 
Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? 
Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? 
And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me, how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? 
See, I wanna know if you believe in any god, or if you believe in many gods. 
Or better yet, what gods believe in you. 
And for all the times you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you’ve asked come true? 
And if they didn’t did you feel denied? 
And if you felt denied, denied by who? 
I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. 
I wanna know what you see in the mirror on a day a day you’re feeling bad. 
I wanna know the first person who ever taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. 
If you ever reach enlightenment, will you remember how to laugh? 
Have you ever been a song? 
Would you think less of me if I told you I have lived my entire life a little off key and I’m not nearly as smart as my poetry I just plagiarized the thoughts of the people around me who have learned the wisdom of silence? 
Do you believe that concrete perpetuates violence? 
And if you do I want you to tell me of a meadow where my skateboard will soar. 
See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. 
And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. 
I wanna know if you bleed sometimes from other people’s wounds. 
And if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon that if you wanted to you could pop—but you never would because you’d never want it to stop. 
If a tree fell in the forest, and you were the only one there to hear it, if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness? 
And lastly, let me ask you this: if you and I went for a walk, and the entire walk we didn’t talk, do you think eventually we’d kiss? 
No way. 
That’s askin’ too much—after all, this is only our first date.

Sophie Theallet for the Gramercy Park Hotel

[PAPERMAG]

Sanja Ivekovic at MoMA

Tiffany x The Sartorialist: What Makes Love True Video

The Belvedere Torso

Belvedere Torso signed by Apollonius, son of Nestor
c. 1st Century BCE

Isn't the spectator's ability to imagine the rest of the body remarkable?
[Scala Archives]

Vertical Pear Salad

You can also substitute apples, walnuts, spinach, and goat cheese! 

Vertical Pear Salad from The Novice Chef

ingredients:

4 smooth skinned pears
2-3 cups watercress
1/2 cup toasted pecans
1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese
vinaigrette dressing
honey for drizzling
lemon juice

directions:

Cut pears horizontally into 3 or 4 slices depending on the size of your pears. Use a paring knife to cut out the cores. The pieces should look like O's. Leave the stem on the pop piece. Brush slices of pear with lemon juice to keep it from browning.

Toss watercress, pecans, and blue cheese with dressing until coated.

Reassemble the pear, vertically, with the watercress salad in between each slice. Once assembled, drizzle with honey, and serve!

Ai Weiwei at Mary Boone, 24th Street

On view through February 4 . . .

I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

— S. Olds

Things That Belong Together

cheese boards & picnic tables

charcuterie & fresh bread

cocktails & dancing

Have a wonderful Friday evening!
[Miss Moss]

How do you dress for the cold ?!

Because low temperatures are not an excuse to quit styling ! 

[Garance Doré // The Sartorialist // Jak & Jil]

Caffè Storico

Chocolate Budino with drunken prunes & whipped crème fraîche

Located within the New York Historical Society, where there is currently a show about the history of American taste

Now available on Folded Victory: POUNOU

Have you ever seen such creative, adorable cards?

Pounou's curvy pen strokes are now available on FoldedVictory.com. 

Follow her blog, pounou <3 you for more whimsical comics. 

California and Bust by Michael Lewis

The smart money says the U.S. economy will splinter, with some states thriving, some states not, and all eyes are on California as the nightmare scenario. After a hair-raising visit with former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who explains why the Golden State has cratered, Michael Lewis goes where the buck literally stops—the local level, where the likes of San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Vallejo fire chief Paige Meyer are trying to avert even worse catastrophes and rethink what it means to be a society.

On August 5, 2011, moments after the U.S. government watched a rating agency lower its credit rating for the first time in American history, the market for U.S. Treasury bonds soared. Four days later, the interest rates paid by the U.S. government on its new 10-year bonds were plummeting on their way to record lows. The price of gold rose right alongside the price of U.S. Treasury bonds, but the prices of virtually all stocks and other bonds in rich Western countries went into a free fall. The net effect of a major U.S. rating agency’s saying that the U.S. government was less likely than before to repay its debts was to lower the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government and to raise it for everyone else. This told you a lot of what you needed to know about the ability of the U.S. government to live beyond its means: it had, for the moment, a blank check. The shakier the United States government appeared, up to some faraway point, the more cheaply it would be able to borrow. It wasn’t exposed yet to the same vicious cycle that threatened the financial life of European countries: a moment of doubt leads to higher borrowing costs, which leads to greater doubt and even higher borrowing costs, and so on until you become Greece. The fear that the United States might actually not pay back the money it had borrowed was still unreal.

On December 14, 2010, the television news program 60 Minutes aired a 14-minute piece about U.S. state and local finances. Correspondent Steve Kroft interviewed a private Wall Street analyst named Meredith Whitney, who, back in 2007, had gone from being obscure to famous when she correctly suggested that Citigroup’s losses in U.S. subprime bonds were far bigger than anyone imagined, and predicted the bank would be forced to cut its dividend. The 60 Minutes segment noted that U.S. state and local governments faced a collective annual deficit of roughly half a trillion dollars, adding that another trillion-dollar gap existed between what the governments owed retired workers and the money they had on hand to pay them. Whitney pointed out that even these numbers were unreliable, and probably optimistic, as the states did a poor job of providing information about their finances to the public. New Jersey governor Chris Christie concurred with her and added, “At this point, if it’s worse, what’s the difference?” The bill owed by American states to retired American workers was so large that it couldn’t be paid, whatever the amount. At the end of the piece, Kroft asked Whitney what she thought about the ability and willingness of the American states to repay their debts. She didn’t see a real risk that the states would default, because the states had the ability to push their problems down to counties and cities. But at these lower levels of government, where American life was lived, she thought there would be serious problems. “You could see 50 to a hundred sizable defaults, [maybe] more,” she said. A minute later Kroft returned to her to ask when people should start worrying about a crisis in local finances. “It’ll be something to worry about within the next 12 months,” she said.

That prophecy turned out to be self-fulfilling: people started worrying about U.S. municipal finance the minute the words were out of her mouth. The next day the municipal-bond market tanked. It kept falling right through the next month. It fell so far, and her prediction received so much attention, that money managers who had put clients into municipal bonds felt compelled to hire more people to analyze states and cities, to prove her wrong. (One of them called it “the Meredith Whitney Municipal Bond Analyst Full Employment Act.”) Inside the financial world a new literature was born, devoted to persuading readers that Meredith Whitney didn’t know what she was talking about. She was vulnerable to the charge: up until the moment she appeared on 60 Minutes she had, so far as anyone knew, no experience at all of U.S. municipal finance. Many of the articles attacking her accused her of making a very specific forecast—as many as a hundred defaults within a year!—that failed to materialize. (Sample Bloomberg News headline: meredith whitney loses credibility as muni defaults fall 60%.) The whirlwind thrown up by the brief market panic sucked in everyone who was anywhere near municipal finance. The nonpartisan, dispassionate, sober-minded Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in Washington, D.C., even released a statement saying that there was a “mistaken impression that drastic and immediate measures are needed to avoid an imminent fiscal meltdown.” This was treated in news accounts as a response to Meredith Whitney, as she was the only one in sight who could be accused of having made such a prediction.

But that’s not at all what she had said: her words were being misrepresented so that her message might be more easily attacked. “She was referring to the complacency of the ratings agencies and investment advisers who say there is nothing to worry about,” said a person at 60 Minutes who reviewed the transcripts of the interview for me, to make sure I had heard what I thought I had heard. “She says there is something to worry about, and it will be apparent to everyone in the next 12 months.”

Whatever else she had done, Meredith Whitney had found the pressure point in American finance: the fear that American cities would not pay back the money they had borrowed. The market for municipal bonds, unlike the market for U.S. government bonds, spooked easily. American cities and states were susceptible to the same cycle of doom that had forced Greece to seek help from the International Monetary Fund. All it took to create doubt and raise borrowing costs for states and cities was for a woman with no standing in the municipal-bond market to utter a few sentences on television. That was the amazing thing: she had offered nothing to back up her statement. She’d written a massive, detailed report on state and local finances, but no one except a handful of her clients had any idea what was in it. “If I was a real nasty hedge-fund guy,” one hedge-fund manager put it to me, “I’d sit back and say, ‘This is a herd of cattle that can be stampeded.’ ”

What Meredith Whitney was trying to say was more interesting than what she was accused of saying. She didn’t actually care all that much about the municipal-bond market, or how many cities were likely to go bankrupt. The municipal-bond market was a dreary backwater. As she put it, “Who cares about the stinking muni-bond market?” The only reason she had stumbled into that market was that she had come to view the U.S. national economy as a collection of regional economies. To understand the regional economies, she had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local finance. “I didn’t have a plan to do this,” she said. “Not one of my clients asked for it. I only looked at this because I needed to understand it myself. How it started was with a question: How can G.D.P. [gross domestic product] estimates be so high when the states that outperformed the U.S. economy during the boom were now underperforming the U.S. economy—and they were 22 percent of that economy?” It was a good question.

From 2002 to 2008, the states had piled up debts right alongside their citizens’: their level of indebtedness, as a group, had almost doubled, and state spending had grown by two-thirds. In that time they had also systematically underfunded their pension plans and other future liabilities by a total of nearly $1.5 trillion. In response, perhaps, the pension money that they had set aside was invested in ever riskier assets. In 1980 only 23 percent of state pension money had been invested in the stock market; by 2008 the number had risen to 60 percent. To top it off, these pension funds were pretty much all assuming they could earn 8 percent on the money they had to invest, at a time when the Federal Reserve was promising to keep interest rates at zero. Toss in underfunded health-care plans, a reduction in federal dollars available to the states, and the depression in tax revenues caused by a soft economy, and you were looking at multi-trillion-dollar holes that could be dealt with in only one of two ways: massive cutbacks in public services or a default—or both. Whitney thought default unlikely, at least at the state level, because the state could bleed the cities of money to pay off its bonds. The cities were where the pain would be felt most intensely. “The scary thing about state treasurers,” she said, “is that they don’t know the financial situation in their own municipalities.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I asked them!”

All states may have been created equal, but they were equal no longer. The states that had enjoyed the biggest boom were now facing the biggest busts. “How does the United States emerge from the credit crisis?” Whitney asked herself. “I was convinced—because the credit crisis had been so different from region to region—that it would emerge with new regional strengths and weaknesses. Companies are more likely to flourish in the stronger states; the individuals will go to where the jobs are. Ultimately, the people will follow the companies.” The country, she thought, might organize itself increasingly into zones of financial security and zones of financial crisis. And the more clearly people understood which zones were which, the more friction there would be between the two. (“Indiana is going to be like, ‘N.F.W. I’m bailing out New Jersey.’ ”) As more and more people grasped which places had serious financial problems and which did not, the problems would only increase. “Those who have money and can move do so,” Whitney wrote in her report to her Wall Street clients, “those without money and who cannot move do not, and ultimately rely more on state and local assistance. It becomes effectively a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ ”

boyish and alluring icon: Jane Birkin

[tenundies, mulilo]

Leonardo Blockbuster Goes to Blockbuster

Noma, Copenhagen

I love making æbleskiver (Scandinavian beignets) for friends and family but usually my fillings are limited to nutella, banana, and gruyere. Noma, however, does a cucumber-herring variation. ... Yum? Interesting.

The rest of their menu is equally creative: here

Victor Matthews at Debuck Gallery

"Maurizio Cattelan: All" at the Guggenheim, New York

On view through January 22
Read about the show here

Middleton in Temperley gown

[Styleite]

"there's a bluebird in my heart" by Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Frank Pepe's of New Haven, CT

The sausage pizza made a great breakfast, while the white clam pizza would have been better served as an evening dish... Nonetheless, both were delicious.

Café Sabarsky's Apfelstrudel (mit Schlag!)

+ check out Ronnie Lauder's private art collection upstairs! (on view through April 2)

Neue Galerie, New York City

The Euro crisis as a "slow moving train-wreck"

Mapping European Stereotypes

a project by Yanko Tsvetkov:

According to the U.S.A.

According to Italy

"Where I Live"

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." -- Virginia Woolf

Padre Nuesto Trail, Bayahibe

"The King of Human Error" by Michael Lewis

We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions—but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so. As they put it:

Lewis is actually speaking here of a central finding in cognitive psychology. In making judgments, people tend to use the “availability heuristic.” As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have shown, people often assess the probability of an event by asking whether relevant examples are cognitively “available” [i.e., can be easily remembered]. Thus [because they more readily recall words ending in “ing” than other words with penultimate “n”s, such as “bond” or “mane”], people are likely to think that more words, on a random page, end with the letters “ing” than have “n” as their next to last letter—even though a moment’s reflection will show that this could not possibly be the case. Now, it is not exactly dumb to use the availability heuristic. Sometimes it is the best guide that we possess. Yet reliable statistical evidence will outperform the availability heuristic every time. In using data rather than professional intuitions, Beane confirmed this point.

You were born together, and together you shall be forever more.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet