Roundtable

The Rest Is History

Two missing engravings leave everyone a suspect, the allure of the masculine astronaut, and the house that built Gatsby is for sale.

By Angela Serratore

Friday, May 22, 2015

Is Alexander the Great the champion of Greece or the hero of Macedonia?

• Who owns Alexander the Great: Greece or Macedonia? In a bid to reclaim its ancient hero and the glory of his empire, Macedonia has embarked on a public works project that has filled its capital of Skopje with triumphal arches, bridges lined with busts, and statues of Alexander astride his horse Bucephalus. (Atlas Obscura)

• “Henry David Thoreau could stick his hand into a bin of pencils and grab exactly twelve in one swoop, a ‘Rain Man’-like skill that impressed his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.” (The New York Times)

• A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, and a manual for Adobe Acrobat were just a few of the texts found on Osama bin Laden’s bookshelves. (Vice)

• If you’re anything like us, you’ve lost entire afternoons to the New York Public Library’s database of historic photographs. Now the entire collection has been mapped, and you can explore shuttered storefronts and long-demolished mansions by standing in the very same spots they once stood. (The Awl)

• “The subtlest spirit of a nation is expressed through its music—and the music acts reciprocally upon the nation’s very soul.” Walt Whitman breaks down the differences between art-singing and heart-singing. (NYRB)

• “Crew-cut, Caucasian, and confident, most astronauts were veterans of World War II or Korea or both. They were all husbands and fathers. They embodied the contradictions embedded in the American masculine ideal.” How the word astronaut came to signify the essence of the all-American superman. (Paris Review Daily)

• When the Vikings began their invasion of England, the women may not have stayed at home. New archeological evidence supports that more often, male and female Vikings arrived in their new territory as “marriage-minded colonists ” and the number of females “may have been somewhere between a third to roughly equal” that of their male co-conquerors. (Science Fair)

• “This time around I saw that I am so deeply out of sympathy with the whole enterprise that it’s immoral for me to teach.” Vivian Gornick has spent half a century writing memoirs, biographies, and more. In this interview, she opens up about the complicated process of teaching others how to write. (Longreads)

• Were two Rembrandt and Dürer engravings—worth over $600,000—stolen or simply mislaid in the stacks of the Boston Public Library? After the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, in which valuable Rembrandts were stolen and never recovered, no one is above suspicion, not even the employees, as police investigate if it was an inside job, as the prints weren’t on display. (Vulture)

• “I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,” Gatsby said, “I’d like to show her around.” The house in Great Neck, N.Y. where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived from 1922 to 1924, and supposedly worked on The Great Gatsby, is on the market for $3.8 million. (CBC News)