Angry birds — and especially smart, angry birds — aren’t just the subject of my latest NYT Mag mini-column. Because my mom collected and bred parrots, they’re something I’ve spent far too much time pondering. Did you know that crows develop grudges against individual people that they impart to their flocks? Or that African Greys are capable of labeling and . . .
I recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the end of the Latin Mass — and Catholic “drama of salvation” novels — even though I strongly disagree that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since the 1960s.”
What Middletown Read tracks borrowing records of Muncie Public Library patrons from 1891 to 1902 and shows how library use is not a lonely act but “part of the complex story of the social nature of reading.”
My latest New York Times Magazine mini-column looks at a sandstorm — “Steinbeck-ish in its arrival,” according to a city councilman — that rolled through Lubbock, Texas last month, as the harbinger of a likely impending Southwestern Dust-Bowlification. “I expected at any moment to see a line of Model Ts coming through headed to California,” the councilman said. “It . . .
My second New York Times Mag mini-column is on the futuristic skyscraper Antoni Gaudí designed in 1908 for what is now Ground Zero. His Hotel Attraction (pictured) would be a lot more fun to watch going up outside my office window than the new glass towers are. But see Rowan Moore on the still-in-process Sagrada Familia: Is it really Gaudí?