The reading crisis, like the social security crisis, has become a con-game based on facts. The NEA announces there are fewer literary readers than two decades ago. Books continue to have more competition from non-book technologies. Will people still read in 2060? As with Social Security, there are variables one just doesn't know how to project forward: fewer people read books but more want to write them, and more and more books are published.

After college I went back to California and took a job at a shop that made customized glassware, like brandy snifters with the names of resorts on them or champagne flutes with romantic quotations engraved around the rim. Most of the business came from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Hawaii, the three capitals of west coast leisure. My job was to tape plastic stencils to the glasses, each with the logo of a hotel or casino—"The Mirage," "The Bellagio," "Kapalua"—or a touristic phrase like "Hang Ten in Hawaii." The glasses were then taken into a garage, where a man in a plastic-lined booth would etch the glass by shooting a high-powered stream of sand through a pneumatic gun attached to an air compressor. The sand bounced off the plastic stencil but gradually abraded the exposed areas of the glass, leaving the text engraved into its surface. Afterwards the glasses were cleaned, boxed, and sent out to gift shops where, to judge by the number of pieces I processed in my nine-month stay at the job, they lined the shelves of liquor cabinets the world over. Read More

On August 27th, 1976, I don't remember being born. A few years later, bored, I sat on the curb outside my parents' studio burning solar holes in a red rubber ball. The magnifying glass had a black handle, hexagonal. I killed ants, too. Los Angeles light is cold and cruel no matter how you use it.

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Physicists write and rewrite the origin of our universe with greater and greater accuracy. Cosmogony approaches perfect recall. In 1927, the theologian Georges LeMaitre first proposed what would become known as the Big Bang Theory, which holds that the universe, when it first appeared 13.7 billion years ago, was infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, and infinitely dense. The current uniform presence of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965, tells us that the infant universe was symmetrical. It did not explode into existence, but upon appearing it expanded and cooled. It did so irregularly, breaking the symmetry, distributing matter unevenly. Why this entropic expansion from symmetry to asymmetry? Read More

Gunpowder

At the Whitney's show of Ruscha drawings last year, the now requisite introductory wall paragraph was so creamsicle-bright it almost became illegible. That was a good start. (Don't tell me you wanted a lengthy explanation before the jokes.) But the curatorial hijinks were just beginning: The museum also displayed his lengthy accordion-book of photos, Every Building On the Sunset Strip, at crotch height. You couldn't stay bent over long enough to inspect the whole thing. Are unsustainable postures funny? I guess it depends. Then they hung the books meant for handheld perusal on chains just a few uncomfortable inches apart, which inspired subway-style reading intimacy. New York's revenge on L.A.'s sense of space? Maybe. Read More

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The financial and bureaucratic issues that complicated the selection of an artist to represent the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale are well known within the art world. After the two principal charitable foundations withdrew their funding, the NEA disbanded its appointed committee as part of a "rethinking" of its own involvement. Then followed a period of stalemate during which it seemed very possible that nothing at all would be done, until a working group of institutions—SF MoMa, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn and the Guggenheim—formed in the autumn of 2004 to select a project, secure its funding, and support its production. Read More

It would be pretty absurd to call the veteran Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha an overnight sensation, but it would also be not so far from the truth. Although he has been making and showing art for over forty years, it is only during the past five years or so that he has truly rocketed into the stratosphere of contemporary art. Following his 2004 Whitney retrospectives, Roberta Smith wrote, "these shows confirm Mr. Ruscha not only as a first-generation Pop artist, but also . . . a Post-pop innovator on a par with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke," while Peter Schjeldahl called him "one of the four most influential artists to have emerged in the nineteen-sixties, along with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Bruce Nauman." Read More

With how many people did people used to sleep? It's hard to tell. Language changes, and there's the problem of bragging. Take the French. Stendhal in his treatise on love is expansive on the seduction strategies of his friends (hide under the bed; announce yourself so late in the night that kicking you out would already be a scandal), but in The Red and the Black Julien Sorel sleeps with exactly two women—and for this they cut off his head! A generation later, the dissipated Frederic Moreau hardly does any better in Sentimental Education. Flaubert himself mostly slept with prostitutes. In Russia, one could always sleep with one's serfs, as Tolstoy did. (He felt terrible about it.) But peers, acquaintances, members of one's own class? America was the worst. Henry James in his notebooks wonders if he should write a story about a man, "like W. D. H. [Howells], who all his life has known but one woman." James had known zero women! Twenty years later, there was Greenwich Village. Edna St. Vincent Millay, riding back and forth all night on the ferry, was the most promiscuous literary woman of her time. But her biographer puts the grand total of her conquests at fourteen, and some of these, according to a rival biographer, are questionable—and three were "well-known homosexuals." So ten. For the modern college senior, this is a busy but not extravagant Spring Break. Read More

In Japan Kenta Kobashi is legendary at what he does: con onlookers into believing he's in a ball-crunchingly real fight. The stolid Kobashi stands 6-foot-2 and weighs 265 pounds, with a wide chest and a variety of facial expressions that put Jim Carrey to shame. If he embodies a Japanese archetype it's that of the fearless warrior, though the wrestling ring is too expressive a place to allow for a warrior's perpetually staid demeanor. On this uncommonly hot October evening, he enters the New Yorker Hotel Ballroom on Eighth Avenue wearing a black robe and red underwear. The crowd chants his name as he climbs into the ring. Standing across from his opponent, tri-state independent wrestler Joe Seannoa, he takes his palm and slaps it against "Samoa" Read More

The people's car is ready to invade America … again. First it was the Nazis, then corporate Japan, then the Eastern Bloc, and now the People's Republic of China is ready to send its hordes. Media attention surrounding the imminent Chinese invasion has focused on the self-promoting schemer Malcolm Bricklin, a serial failure in the auto import business. But the real story is the shrinking space for the people's car in modern America.