Roundtable

The Rest Is History

Fair housing, darts, and the meaning (or not) of unibrows.

By Jaime Fuller

Friday, April 13, 2018

Portrait of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, 1932. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Portrait of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, 1932. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

• The 1918 flu epidemic in photos. (The Atlantic)

• This week in unexpected headlines: “How a Jersey Crime Reporter Became a High-End Robber.” (WNYC)

• Meet “perhaps the single greatest pornographer produced in the English language”: “With characters like ‘Buggeranthos,’ ‘C__tigratia,’ ‘C__ticula,’ ‘Clytoris,’ and of course ‘Fuckadillia,’ the late seventeenth-century play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, would seem to be little more than pornography. And yet, in certain critical respects, this bawdy play embodied the Restoration.” (JSTOR Daily)

• Jesmyn Ward on The Great Gatsby: “That, perhaps, was the idea most invisible to me as a young reader: that the very social class that embodied the dream Gatsby wanted for himself was predicated on exclusion. That Gatsby was doomed from the start. He’d been born on the outside; he would die on the outside.” (The New York Times Book Review)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks to new Americans about the history of their new country—and quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than other nations but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” (Washington Post)

• Frida Kahlo in pop culture: “Some days, seeing women—who are, for the most part, white—take up an interest in the most famous Mexican artist of all time is wildly validating. But then I think of the incredibly stylish girl who wanted a unibrow, and I think of all the Frida Kahlo tote bags and T-shirts I see in stores and on Instagram, and I find a small part of me very quietly wondering, ‘Why now? ’” (Racked)

• Fifty years later, “the Fair Housing Act has never fully delivered on its promise to promote and further integration.” (NewYorker.com)

• Tarsila do Amaral and “Brazil’s marginalized histories.” (Hyperallergic)

• This week in obituaries: a darts superstar, the director who cofounded Studio Ghibli, an abstract painter, the “honorary solicitor for the Ramblers’ Association,” and “the untouchable emperor of the art of noise.”