New York City

Karin Sander, "Olivier Renaud-Clement, 1:10," (1999-2000)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
NYTimes:

Somewhat more profound are two toy-size figurines by Karin Sander that represent the art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clement and the writer Gordon Tapper. Ms. Sander created these portraits in a two-stage industrial process, taking digital pictures from different angles and then feeding the data into a model-making machine. The photograph becomes an intermediate stage between the real and the virtual, rather than an end in itself.

Sukiyaki Western Django

Photo: Takeshi Ikeda/First Look Studios
From left, Koichi Sato, Teruyuki Kagawa, and Masato Sakai
Director: Takashi Miike

Denver, Colorado

Senator Barack Obama

Reuters/Rick Wilking

I will quote once again from Andrew Sullivan, whose thoughts on Obama have resonated with me:

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn't shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security - face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That's a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I'm biased at this point. I'm one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I'm not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I've said it before - months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

28 August 1963

Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Martin Luther King Jr. on the Mall in Washington D.C.:

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

President Wm Jefferson Clinton

Photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times

"People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

Senator Hillary Clinton

"We need leaders once again who can tap into that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges. Leaders who can help us show ourselves and the world that with our ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit, there are no limits to what is possible in America.

"This won't be easy. Progress never is. But it will be impossible if we don't fight to put a Democrat in the White House."

Venice

Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

I am a 36 year old African American woman. I have two girls ages 10 and 8. The country does not get the full import of this moment. My daughters and I sat together along with my husband to watch Michelle Obama tonight. Mr. Sullivan, we were all in tears. This is a day that cannot be fully described. This country has systematically oppressed Black women for centuries. My ancestors were slaves and my great, great, great, grandmothers raped and treated as property. My daughters have very few Black women to look up to in popular culture as role models. They do not feel seen, they are not held up as the standards of American beauty. We shed tears tonight as a family because Michelle (with her elegance and grace) is holding all of us up with her. You don't understand the burden that she bears.

No, I don't. How could I? But as she spoke of somehow being able to reach for the American dream, through struggle and disdain and marginalization, it wasn't just about race or gender - but about all those things that Americans have overcome. I couldn't help but think, perhaps solipsistically, of my wedding a year ago this week. And what it means. And what it would have meant to countless gay people who, for centuries, were brutalized, mocked, jailed, murdered and beaten for who they were. And I get a part of this in a different way. And am glad.

...Michelle did it. She more than did it. She struck fear in the GOP tonight. Their lies about the Obamas will fail. As they should.

Spain

Photo: Denis Doyle for the New York Times
NYTimes: Gormaz was once one of the largest castles in Europe. Situated on a hilltop with breathtaking views to the horizon and the Duero on both sides, it was once a Muslim fortress.

Lebbeus Woods

Photo: Lebbeus Woods
“All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces,” said Mr. Woods. “But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.”

Obama/Biden 08

Matthew Mitcham

via Andrew Sullivan:
Matthew Mitcham of Australia celebrates his gold medal in the Men's 10m Platform Final diving event held at the National Aquatics Center on Day 15 of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on August 23, 2008 in Beijing, China. Mitcham is the only openly gay male athlete at the games, and prevented a Chinese sweep of the diving medals with a perfect final dive. By Jamie Squire/Getty.

Andrew Sullivan

I'm not a big fan of targeting politicians for their wealth. I don't begrudge anyone succeeding and admire many fabulously wealthy Americans. But the inheritance - rather than earning - of great riches can rub some the wrong way. George W. Bush is not wealthy because he earned it; his family connections made all the difference. And John McCain, who hails from a very privileged family, married money that most people can barely imagine. If your house just got foreclosed on, or you can't afford the mortgage any more, this is not someone you can easily identify with:

Those real estate holdings include a Sedona ranch with three dwellings, worth $1.1 million; a Phoenix condominium suite that had originally been two units, worth $4.7 million; an $847,800 three-bedroom high-rise condo in Arlington; an oceanfront condo in La Jolla, Calif.; a half-million-dollar loft in Phoenix purchased for their daughter Meghan; another Phoenix condo, worth $830,000; and two beachfront condos in Coronado, Calif, one of which is valued at $2.7 million. The other was purchased just this year, as McCain was lamenting the difficulties that struggling Americans were facing just to make their mortgage payments. Cindy McCain told Vogue magazine the family needed the second condo because the first was getting too crowded as their family grew.

I don't know about you, but this is more distant to me than someone who just earned a bunch of royalties for a book he actually wrote himself.

California

Photo: Jason Liske
NYTimes: The long, narrow pool at the Hillan-Robertson home reflects the California hills and sky like a mirror, all part of the plan by (landscape designer) Bernard Trainor.

Calvin Klein

Photo: Chris Moore/Karl Prouse

Agreed

A reader at Josh Marshall's TPM writes:

I think we'll look back on August as when Obama won the election. August was when John McCain had the chance to define Obama and so cement a negative view of him that he could never recover. Now his time is almost up, the conventions are about to begin and we get into the full swing of the campaign. And what did McCain get out of his month? The Gallup tracking poll barely budged; most polls show Obama still with a modest lead, only slightly less than where he started a month or so ago. Obama's negatives are up somewhat -- no surprise after the pummeling he took -- but hardly up to critical levels. Unlike with Kerry, no single message has stuck -- he's a flipflopper! No, he's a scary leftist! No he's an empty celebrity! With no single negative image, the effect is likely to diffuse over time, especially with a successful Democratic convention. I think Obama's played this just right so far.

Yes, lots of folks are complaining he hasn't gone after McCain enough but it simply wouldn't have worked. McCain has not been the story -- Obama has been. Unfair, sure, but that's the way it is. Obama's the new guy in town and everyone is trying to figure him out. So instead of fecklessly launching attack after attack on McCain only to have them disappear into the ether, he sat back and played rope-a-dope waiting for his moment.

Now his moment is coming. The VP choice, the convention, the post-Labor Day sharpening of people's attention, the debates and the full onslaught of ads, money, and organization. Can he blow it? Sure. He's new to this. He can make the wrong VP choice. He can give an empty, if soaring, acceptance speech (or it could rain!) Hillary and Bill (especially Bill) could add a sour taste to the convention and make that the story. He could fall short of expectations in the debate. But all (or most of those) are under his control. I would *so* rather be Obama heading toward November than McCain. It's his for the taking if he just executes it right.

Fay

Photo: Matthew Ratajczak/Associated Press
Tropical Storm Fay stirred up the waters of the Indian River Lagoon in Jensen Beach, Fla. The slow-moving, soggy storm never achieved hurricane status before coming ashore around 5 a.m. Eastern time near Cape Romano, south of Naples, after shifting slightly east overnight.

Georgia

Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
Georgian prisoners on a Russian armored personnel carrier after being detained by Russian troops in the Black Sea port city of Poti, Georgia, on Tuesday.

Catalonia

Photo: Matias Costa for The New York Times
Sunflowers on the outskirts of Castelló d’Empúries.

nyrb

Inverted World
By Christopher Priest
Afterword by John Clute

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.

The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.

Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

Beijing

Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Bradley Wiggins of Britain breaks an Olympic record while qualifying for the men's individual pursuit during a track cycling event.

Hawaii

Barack Obama and his daughters.

Cambodia

BBC Online: A Cambodian youth performs a backward dive into the Tonle Sap lake in Phnom Penh, in front of the country's Royal Palace.

Beijing

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Garrett Weber-Gale, left, and Michael Phelps screamed for joy after their teammate Jason Lezak out-touched Alain Bernard of France in the 4x100 freestyle final, helping the U.S. win the gold. Lezak's time of 46.06 seconds was the fastest 100 split ever, 0.73 faster than the previous mark.

Vermont

Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

08.08.08

Illustration: Ben Schott/New York Times
(click to enlarge image)

Thomas Paul

Photo: Lars Klove for The New York Times
Melamine plates: $36 for a set of four dinner plates, $28 for a set of four salad plates, $15 for a set of four coasters at utilitieshome.com.

Beijing

Photo: Joe Chan/Reuters

On Obama

Andrew Sullivan:

[I]t's remarkable that a first-term senator's proposals on Iraq, having been decried as defeat and surrender by McCain and Bush, came to be endorsed by the Iraqi "government," and that McCain and Bush had to adjust their own views accordingly. It's rare that any American politician who is not president would bring hundreds of thousands of foreigners into the streets of Berlin. It's rare that a Democratic nominee would be endorsed by the most successful young right-of-center politician in Britain, and be hailed by the conservative president of France. It's rare that such a newbie could pull off a complicated and pitfall-laden foreign tour without any noticeable gaffes or blunders. McCain is attacking Obama as a celebrity because Obama gave him no opening to attack him as an incompetent or unready on the world stage.

The fundamentals of the Obama campaign remain impressive to me. I have a feeling they will endure, even when the McCain camp sustains some tactical victories. In the end, this election will be decided on the core issues. On these, Obama still retains a serious advantage.

Photographer: Nadav Kander

2008 British Olympic swimmer Gregor Tait.

Recommended

Highly, especially for Jim Thompson fans.
Also recommended from NYRB: Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock.

Illustrator: Christopher Silas Neal

Ad Reinhart

Photo: John Loengard/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images
Reinhardt working on one of his “black” paintings in July 1966.
NYTimes:

From his notebooks and letters, we know how Reinhardt siphoned off most of the oil from his oil paint to achieve a powdery surface. We also know that he added small quantities of color to his blacks in order to differentiate them. And we know how he applied his paint with carefully layered strokes to create the illusion of an unstroked surface. The black paintings are delicate: the mere touch of a finger leaves a permanent imprint. Their fragility contributed to them being perceived, and valued, as pure things in a corrupted world.

Diving

Photo: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
NYTimes: David Boudia, Thomas Finchum Synchronized Platform Diving, United States 2007 Pan American Games Gold Medalists.