Swine before pearls.

Gene Weingarten won the Pulizter Prize for Feature Writing in 2008 and 2010. Both stories were written for the Washington Post, where Weingarten works as a staff writer. The first story, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” concerns an experiment. The Post persuaded Joshua Bell, one of the best classical violinists in the world, to busk in the Washington Metro. The results were astonishing — and ran counter to the expectations of nearly everyone involved. Implicit throughout is the notion that we, citizens of the great western democracies, spend much of our time in the sweet embrace of oblivion. We simply don’t notice things that are happening around us. Bell’s performance, Weingarten writes, proved no exception:

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Typography 101

Arial and Helvetica are two common typefaces that are, superficially at least, very similar. In fact, they are indistinguishable to most people. This is, as even a cursory examination will reveal, clearly not the case. Matthew Butterick, author of Typography for Lawyers, an excellent introduction to the basic tenets of typographic style, writes: “As a system font, Arial has achieved ubiquity akin to Times New Roman. And like Times New Roman, Arial is permanently associated with the work of people who will never care about typography.” This might seem like unjustified obloquy — after all, doesn’t everyone use Arial? — but Butterick is fundamentally correct. Arial is a terrible font:

...to typographers, Arial contains none of the consistency and balance that makes Helvetica successful. For instance, the ends of the lowercase a, c, e, g, s, and t in Helvetica are exactly horizontal. In Arial, those ends are sloped arbitrarily. Reading Arial is like trying to have dinner on a tippy restaurant table.

Keeping this in mind, Ironic Sans has composed a simple test. Can you separate the wheat from the chaff?

Apartment Story

This is a radical departure. I vowed to avoid the cliché of flogging my own musical taste; I promised to keep this site free from superfluous or gratuitous videos. Now that I have failed in my vow and my promise, please listen to this band. They're called the National. They're from Cincinnati and are based in Brooklyn.

Scott Schuman

Scott Schumann is The Sartorialist. His is my favourite website, the one I always come back to. His photographs are visceral and raw, untouched by the electronic bristles of a photoshop brush. Most of his work is beautifully ambiguous. His photographs have a quality that I struggle to articulate. A friend of mine found this short documentary and sent it to me; now I'm sharing with you.

A strange and wonderful book

One of the most bizarre books in my collection is Winston S. Churchill's treatise on art, Painting as a Pastime. Subtitled "an instructive and inspiring invitation to the joy of painting," this book represents a pronounced departure from Churchill's preferred medium – enormous magisterial works of exhaustively researched (and depending on with whom you speak, tendentious) history. Churchill, who was by no means a bad painter, provides a brief but compelling argument for the many advantages of artistic activity. The text runs to a mere 25 pages. Perhaps two dozen colour plates follow, each displaying one of the great man's paintings. (His work, incidentally, is not at all bad.) Painting as a Pastime is a remarkable book, both for its strangeness and its insight into the mind of a true polymath.