Ed Simon

Mission Viejo

Writer and Editor at Freelance

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Articles

Pope Francis’s Aesthetics of Humility

3 weeks ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

The most representative photograph of Pope Francis — then just Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina — captures him sitting on a simple, slatted wooden bench on the subway in his native city. An oblivious crowd of commuters and students stands and shifts around the future pontiff, who wears the simple black shirt and Roman collar of the Society of Jesus in which he was ordained, staring at the photographer with piercing brown eyes and maybe the slight hint of a smile.
Clara Peeters’s Still Lifes Are Even Better Than the Real Thing

3 weeks ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

The city of Gouda in Holland acquired a monopoly on the Dutch cheese trade by 1395, selling its eponymous dairy product for more than two centuries before Clara Peeters applied oil to canvas.
Book Plate: Ed Simon Imagines Money

1 month ago | 3quarksdaily.com | Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I've most recently read, including upcoming titles. There was a meme that circulated a few years back amongst the tweedier of the interwebs which roughly claimed that when it came to literature, great French novels are about love, the Russians focus on existence, and Americans are concerned with money.
American Literature’s White Whale: Why the “Great American Novel” is Still Worth Pursuing

1 month ago | lithub.com | Ed Simon

John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Session to Loyalty might not have been the “Great American Novel,” but its author was the first who conceived of their being such a thing.
A Glimpse of Eternity at the Carnegie Museum’s Hall of Architecture

1 month ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. For nearly a millennium, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, with its columns, colonnades, and gleaming pyramid for a crown, overlooked the capital of the province of Caria in Asia Minor, before a series of earthquakes in the 13th century leveled the monument.
Close Reading Edna St. Vincent Millay

2 months ago | 3quarksdaily.com | Ed Simon

Impossible to know which one of those perennial evergreen subjects - love or death - poetry considers more, but certainly verse can be particularly charged when it combines those two. Love and death, the only topics worthy of serious contemplation, where anything else worth orienting the mind towards is merely an amalgamation of that pair.
Gertrude Abercrombie’s American Surrealism

2 months ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. PITTSBURGH — In 1935, a 26-year-old largely self-taught painter named Gertrude Abercrombie accompanied her friend, the writer Thorton Wilder, to a lecture at the University of Chicago in her native Hyde Park. There, she would meet the lecturer who would become a lifelong influence and mentor of sorts: Gertrude Stein.
Book Plate: Ed Simon Imagines Europe

2 months ago | 3quarksdaily.com | Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I've most recently read, including upcoming titles. I'm a sucker for a certain type of European novel, or if not actually European, something that trades in all of those connotations of that continent, of that word.
Donald Trump Brings Back “Degenerate Art”

2 months ago | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. At the end of its previous term, the Trump administration turned its attention toward the arts.
Julia Warhola Was an Artist in Her Own Right

Jan 26, 2025 | hyperallergic.com | Ed Simon

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, please join us as a member. A little more than a mile south of Northside Scrap Metals, a family-owned business that recycles “Copper, Brass, Aluminum, Cans, Wire or any junk metal,” is the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, dedicated to one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century.