“The Tragedy of Arthur,” a novel by Arthur Phillips, is a bold and tangled work in two acts. The first is a faux-memoir, in which Phillips’s father, also an Arthur Phillips, has discovered a previously unknown Shakespeare play, also called “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Arthur Sr.—who happens to be a convicted forger—enlists Phillips’s help in […]
Author Archives: Sally
High Times
New York’s High Line doubled its size last week, expanding ten blocks north to West Thirtieth Street. During the expansion, the park’s staff shared videos, updates, and event information via the High Line Blog—including this video, featuring Organized C.H.A.O.S., a step team that performed June 16th, as part of the Step to the High Line […]
Cleveland Watches the Finals
Last night, when I heard the Dallas Mavericks had defeated the Miami Heat, four games to two, I cheered. I don’t know very much about basketball, and I didn’t follow the N.B.A. Finals. But I’m from Cleveland, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I will root for any team the Pittsburgh Steelers […]
A Tender Age
In her post introducing June’s Book Club selection, “House of Prayer No. 2,” by Mark Richard, Macy cites a passage that includes this sentence: Sometimes in the orange and grey dust when the world is empty, the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousand starlings swarm Dr. Jim’s chimneys, and the […]
Power to the People
Years ago, before it was glutted with reality shows, MTV was the arbiter of pop music. But the channel abandoned music videos around the time the Internet fragmented the music industry, creating niches within niches—and listeners who found themselves increasingly isolated. Recently, YouTube rolled out its YouTube 100, a weekly top-100 chart of music videos […]
Briefliest Noted
Sometimes, I just have nothing more to say here about my Brieflier Noted posts. What, I’m going to summarize a summary of a summary? That reminds me of my junior-year English class, in which we didn’t read great works of literature but instead read something called Masterplots, which, as far as I now can tell, […]
G-Force
Last week, Google announced its much-anticipated music service, Music Beta by Google, which allows users to upload their personal music collections to the cloud and listen to them on any computer or enabled Android device. Because the songs are stored online, they don’t take up space on a device or hard drive; when users are […]
Secret Life
Anne Frank lived in hiding in Amsterdam for more than two years, and last April, the Secret Annex Online, a site devoted to the exploration of Prinsengracht 263, launched to show what the house looked like during the time that the Frank family lived there. “I wander from room to room, climb up and down […]
Lit Bits
Two weeks ago marked the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an online cultural magazine founded on the belief that literary criticism can flourish on the Internet. “Contrary to the notion that the literary arts are dying off, we believe a reading renaissance is underway in America,” says the founding editor Tom Lutz, […]
Bye, Buy Brownstone
Remember when Lucy tells Charlie Brown that all she really wants for Christmas is real estate? I get it now. From this week’s Briefly Noted review of “The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn,” by Suleiman Osman: Today, Brooklyn real estate is among the most expensive and coveted in the nation. Read this week’s Brieflier Noted to […]