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One day at work I fall into brine and they close the lid above me by mistake. Much time passes; it feels like long sleep. When the lid is finally opened, everybody is dressed strange, in colorful, shiny clothes. I do not recognize them. They tell me they are “conceptual artists” and are “reclaiming the abandoned pickle factory for a performance space.” I realize something bad has happened in Brooklyn…
In Simon Rich’s humorous new novella “Sell Out,” a pickle maker from the early 1900s topples into brine, and is magically transported to modern-day Williamsburg.
Over the next four days, we’ll be serializing an excerpt of Rich’s story on our website. Click-through to read Part One, and return tomorrow for Part Two: http://nyr.kr/114ObWW -
Bloc Heads
A Soviet tank in Budapest, 1956, during the Hungarian revolution.
From this week’s issue, Louis Menand reads Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe,” a book about totalitarianism in Europe during the twentieth century: http://nyr.kr/QZywWr
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“What are those?” a recent museumgoer wailed, pounding small fists against a display case.
“Stop that!” the boy’s mother answered. “They’re blocks, O.K.?”
“But what’s inside the blocks?” the boy yelled. “What’s inside the blocks?”
Emma Allen on the exhibition baffling younger visitors at the MoMA: “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000”: http://nyr.kr/TjCYNG
Photograph: Detail from Stahlromöbel, a loose-leaf sales catalogue for furniture offered by the Thonet Company, showing Marcel Breuer’s B341/2 chair and B53 table, 1930-31. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art/Department of Architecture and Design Study Center.
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"I’m not a reënactor, I’m not a trained historian, and I’m not a trained cook,” Lohman said. “I see it as an elaborate form of performance art."
—Foodie-historian Sarah Lohman “has built a career revisiting long-forgotten recipes from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.”
