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Dec 27, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Cullen Murphy
My father enjoyed venturing an opinion in tones of mock-Victorian high purpose, and I remember him once going off, during a show at the Society of Illustrators, about the difference between working in oil and working in watercolor. An oil painting could be created over a long period of time; could be treated like a stage set; could accommodate second opinions and be revised. In some ways, it was like a movie. A watercolor was a performance, created in the moment: paper wet, vision fresh.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Cullen Murphy
A red-and-yellow tulip in the ripe sheen of fullness, the lines of color in its petals at times no wider than the hair of a paint brush. A brown-and-purple onion, the flaking outer skin so delicate and brittle that it seems to crackle. A mottled and disintegrating umber leaf, veins prominent, its days of autumnal glory forever past. Can minimalism be lavish?
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Cullen Murphy
Technology14 hours agoNASA video shows spacecraft's wild ride around ocean worldMashable - Mark Kaufman • 14h"You get out of there." NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is in for a wild ride.
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Aug 1, 2024 | 
msn.com | Cullen Murphy
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Aug 1, 2024 | 
msn.com | Cullen Murphy
Continue reading More for You Continue reading More for You
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Aug 1, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Cullen Murphy
Constraints can be liberating. My father was a cartoonist, and at public events, he’d ask someone to put three big marks on a piece of paper—lines, squiggles, blotches—and then tell him what to draw: a house, a horse, a flower. Somehow, he could always do it—but the angle and approach would be unexpected. That memory returned as I explored the forthcoming revised edition of Neal Slavin’s When Two or More Are Gathered Together, first published almost half a century ago.
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Jul 25, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Cullen Murphy
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. “I shall not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”Those are the words not of President Joe Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, but of a previous president who took himself out of the running: Lyndon B.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
theatlantic.com | Cullen Murphy |Scott Stossel
William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that 50 years of living in New York and New England never much eroded. It was as much a part of him as his love of jazz, his understated sartorial consistency, and his deep dismay when encountering the misuse of lie and lay, a battle he knew he had lost but continued to fight.
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Jan 5, 2024 | 
airmail.news | Cullen Murphy
Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T. E. Lawrence by Ranulph Fiennes Once or twice a year, when I was a teenager, my father would take me into Manhattan for lunch with a group he belonged to, the Dutch Treat Club. On one of those occasions, in 1967, he made a point of introducing me to another of the members, a tall, thin man whose pinstripe suit and pencil mustache marked him as a visitor from a vanished world.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
theatlantic.com | Cullen Murphy
A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans. You could be forgiven for thinking that a label on a map—in this case the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT, pronounced somewhat like “buyout”—is something you could take at face value.
