One of the many Philip K. Dick books that Chris Moore did cover illustrations for was “Beyond Lies the Wub: Volume One of the Collected Stories.” Credit… Chris Moore, via Art Partners. [New York Times caption and illustration]
… Mr. Moore remained steadfast in avoiding lofty posturing as a fine artist. “If someone wants a picture of a horse to illustrate their new range of lasagna,” he said in the Agency Partners interview, “then I follow the brief and produce a picture of an Italian horse.”
“Call him a master, or a titan in his sphere, and he simply won’t have it,” Stephen Gallagher wrote in the introduction to the book “Journeyman: The Art of Chris Moore,” a 2000 collaboration with the artist. “The most you’ll ever get out of him is a grudging admission of some quiet satisfaction when something in a picture comes right.”
(Alex Williams, “Chris Moore, Illustrator for Classic Sci-Fi Books, Dies at 77,” New York Times, 3-12-25)
With apologies to William Jennings Bryan, it’s called a “rug pull”:
A celebrity touts a new digital coin, prices soar and then insiders who own most of the coins pull the rug: They sell their stakes for a big profit at the expense of amateur investors who got in later.
For the portraitist, ever a student of faces, President Milei’s is a study in vulpine.
[photo from New York Times illustration] [photo from New York Times illustration] (President and sister.) [from New York Times illustration]
(Jack Nicas and David Yaffe-Bellany, “Milei, $Melania and Memecoins: Unraveling Argentina’s Crypto Fiasco,” New York Times, 2-28-25)
A New Yorker cover by Ms. Simpson from 1993, her last year with the magazine. Credit…Gretchen Dow Simpson & The New Yorker. [New York Times caption and illustration]
While modest, solitary buildings were often her subject matter, Ms. Simpson’s work was not purely representational. A former commercial photographer, she applied a telephoto approach to many of her paintings, zooming in on windows, doorways or rooftops to emphasize the juxtaposed angles and intersecting lines that characterized her work, giving it the feel of abstract art.
(Alex Williams,, “Gretchen Dow Simpson, Creator of New Yorker Covers, Dies at 85,” New York Times, 4-25-25)
Commenting on consumerism, Ms. Garner came up with a host of flagrantly unnecessary gadgets and accessories, including “Tongue-Texting,” pencil on paper. Credit… Courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown and STARS.
“I tried to set an example that nobody else can follow.”
(Pippa Garner)
A one-off slogan printed on her T-shirt series called “Shirtstorm” was “These Are My Remains.”
(Will Heinrich, “Pippa Garner, Conceptual Artist With a Satirical Streak, Dies at 82,” New York Times, 1-7-25)
Que la lumière soit. Et la lumière fut. Que haya luz. Y hubo luz. Let there be light. And there was light. (Photo by JMN).
Bret Stephens, conservative columnist for the New York Times, Jew raised in Mexico, fluent Spanish speaker, quotes (from memory) a poem called “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins at the end of The Conversation with Gail Collins.
In my reading I rarely seek out Hopkins any more, but when he’s put before me I’m seduced again by his jazzy prosody. The poesy theurge channeled by the English Jesuit induces contemplative frenzy in the susceptible. Am I one?
Take rhyme (please! — ha-ha!): In current verse I almost always find recurring end rhyme to be deafening and deadening as far as lifting poetry from the trenches is concerned. English is a consonantal, assonant tongue with dirty vowels and minimal morphological inflection. The language isn’t built for long stretches of ding-donging from a daft belfry. Hopkins, however, can make daft sexy. It’s to be noted from the start that all the poem’s rhymes are made from common, monosyllabic words.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. […]
Messiahs are anointed (oiled) beings (Spanish untado. Arabic masīḥ, meaning wiped, clean, smooth, besides anointed.) Shining shaken from foil, betokening the flaming out of a light source, cuts the mustard as a bit of derring do in the way of simile. Enjambment takes the pressure off the incestuous rhyme of oil with foil, landing the beat on a strongly voiced adjective at a pausal juncture: Crushed. Boom! Stress that would fall on “oil” is shunted to the next line. Line 3, the one with ooze, is a solitary hexameter.
Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
“Then now” — conjunction next to adverb: The feisty collocation manages to connote epochal habituation, an unending history of not reckoning with the Boss, not following His Rules. Hopkins triples down on the rod-trod pairing — more kissing cousin coupling! Far from shifting stress off the rhyme, he compels attention to it with tolling repetition, conveying again the feel of endless traipsing and trampling, wallowing in waywardness. Everyone has strayed, does stray, will stray. There follows a rampage of rhyme and half-rhyme alloyed with alliteration.
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent;
And for all that, Mother Earth, at least, is thriving, evergreen, never-changing. Ha-ha! The showy sequence is admirably legible, thanks in part to the kindness of punctuation. Behold this phrase without its strategic comma: “nor can foot feel being shod.”
On top of lucidity, Hopkins excels at one of the things I admire most: syntactic compression. He expels the rank man-breath from verbiage, like air burped from Tupperware. There’s a taut, tight tension in one phrase of the following line which is borderline manic. Can you spot it?
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
It’s in the locative adverbial phrase “deep down things.” Eliding the preposition “in” (or “within” or “inside”…) after “down” falls just shy of redlining comprehension, in keeping with how Hopkins buffs phrasing to the bare bone.
The poem ends on pious fustian exercised exclamatorily over a black-brown-brinkish-brooding-breasty thing with ah! bright wings. It has shot its fox before reaching the Holy Ghost — a fall from grace poetically, except for one trope: the world is bent. God yes — double, like the pitiable creatures in a Salvadoran hoosegow. The last word is the poet’s, blessèdly.
And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I do solitary battle with poetry. Yes, battle. I challenge the poem, it challenges me. Me and the poem, the two of us in mental combat.
From the former Gulf of Mexico To the shores of Zuiderzee, I have pondered verses bad and good In the air, on land and sea. (To the tune of The Marines’ Hymn)
Kidding. It’s a tussle, but I’m on poetry’s side. Also the Marines’s. Semper Fi.
No one in my acquaintance likes it. That’s OK. It’s not a social medium. Poetry doesn’t need an “audience,” a circle, a claque of cognoscenti. Poetry needs a reader. I’m that man. This farflung outpost is my station. I will defend poetry here. Something Poetry editor Adrian Matejka writes in the latest issue gladdens me:
“Miscommunication” has the Latin root “communicare,” which can mean either “common” or “shared,” and in poetry, I imagine “shared” speaks to everyone involved — both poet and reader offering their understandings and confusions in equal value.” (Poetry, May 2025)
A professional’s acknowledgment of the reader’s portion of credit and blame in making poetry happen is sweet. A poem’s signal, after all, is a vagrant wave until it meets a receiver. By the way, there’s report of a formidable poetry power in the world with which to rub shoulders and deal squarely — I speak of China.
Since the time of the Shijing (Book of Songs), which dates back to the Zhou Dynasty (c. 1046-256 BCE), poetry has served not only as an artistic form but also as a vehicle for moral guidance, emotional expression, political commentary, religious teaching, and personal reflection. It has permeated both elite and popular culture, shaping every aspect of Chinese life. (Chun Yu, “A Circle Comes Together,” Poetry, April 2025)
Let’s set our children to learning Mandarin sooner rather than later. They’ll fare better artistically, morally, emotionally, politically, religiously and personally.
Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie. (Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884,” via the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection/The Art Institute of Chicago). [New York Times caption and illustration]
“But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.”
Here are excerpts from the article by Ross Douthat, conservative Catholic opinion writer for the New York Times.
Some of these choices will be especially difficult for liberals, since they will often smack of chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction. Family lines will survive only because of a clear preference for one’s own kith and kin as opposed to just some general affection for humanity. Important art forms will survive only because of a frank elitism, an insistence on distinction, a contempt for mediocrity. [… My bolding.]
Douthat’s phrase “as opposed to just some general affection for humanity” is dissonant to my ear. I would rather it read, “… in addition to general affection for humanity.” Also, is it settled wisdom that “insistence on distinction” and “contempt for mediocrity” shall forever be deemed to appertain to an “elite” and not to the generality of humankind?
“[Being pulled back into the virtual, the performative, the fundamentally unreal] is one temptation I’m very familiar with, as someone whose professional life is a mostly digital existence, where together with others who share my concerns I am perpetually talking, talking, talking … when the necessary thing is to go out into reality and do.”
Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read. […]
(Ross Douthat, “Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction,” New York Times, 4-19-25)
“Outcast” (1974) was one of many images of Richard M. Nixon that Mr. Holland created for The Times. Credit… Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The larger, more established studios, he later recalled, did not take to his eccentric work, responding with blank stares and, in one instance, suggesting religious counseling.
My title is illustrator Brad Holland’s comment in turning down an assignment offered by Playboy in 1967. The magazine hired him anyway, and he worked there for a quarter century.
“In conventional professional terms, everything I said and did during those three days was wrong,” Mr. Holland wrote on his blog in 2018. “But God bless Art Paul [Playboy’s art director], I had done them with the right guy. I had stumbled up the stairs in the dark, and when the lights came on, there I was.”
When Time magazine declared the Ayatollah Khomeini “Man of the Year” in January 1980, it was Mr. Holland’s stern portrait that glared from the cover. Credit… Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Holland’s remark later in life about stumbling up the stairs in the dark stayed with me. It reminds me of the reliable saying, “When you reach your destination, there you are.”
He worked constantly on his own ideas, which he said sprang from his unconscious, or from characters he saw on the street, or from some philosophical concept he was trying to puzzle through.
(Penelope Green, “Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81,” New York Times, 4-13-25)
EthicalDative 
‘Machismo’ Cuts the Cheese Over Yonder
Fun fact: In Great Britain they pronounce it mah-KIZ-mo. On the shores of the Gulf of
MexicoAmericaMar-a-Lago we say mah-CHEESE-mo.(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved