Guernica talks to Fatima Bhutto, 27-year-old poet and Pakistan’s heir apparent, about the death of her father in one of Pakistan’s famous “encounters,” the two sides of Benazir and why Obama legitimizes the Taliban.
In “Dancing About Architecture,” Arthur Philips’s essay in the July issue of The Believer, Philips offers a worthy apology for writing on music, and why the physical impact of the phrase “chill horn,” in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, has value.
“Head Trips,” an essay in Cabinet on the history of comic foregrounds, those painted wooden facades with a hole where your head should be, offers an interesting meditation on the historic role of the comic foreground as vehicle for fleeting transcendence from one’s social stratum.
In her latest journal entry, “Time Wastes Too Fast,” for her ongoing NYT Pursuit of Happiness series, Maira Kalman visually portrays her visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home, in which she offers twee renditions of the home that Jefferson designed, a note that he wrote to Adams, “I cannot live without books,” and touches on his conflicted relation to slavery.
And small non-journal-related aside: don’t bother trying to get your kids into Camp Quest, an atheist summer camp funded by Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, for tots who’d rather learn to disprove telepathy and crop circles than paint pottery. It’s filled for summer.
