Line 10 of the Paris Métro terminates almost five miles west of the center of the city at Boulogne-Pont de Saint-Cloud. The station is a polished hub in one of the wealthiest regions of Paris, not to mention all of France. Boulogne-Billancourt is the birthplace of France’s aviation industry and the site of the historic Chateau Rothschild. It is also home to the Musée Albert-Kahn, an archive of the planet.
It is a madcap, romantic thing to try to document the entire Earth, an undertaking so ambitious and so hopeful it must be delusional. And yet, faced with the crisis of a rapidly changing world at the start of the 20th century, that is precisely what Albert Kahn sought to do. Between 1909 and 1931, he dispatched a team to distant lands to record the world in photography and film exactly as it was: its people, landforms and ways of life. For Kahn, it was primarily an effort to understand and produce images of human complexity as a means of promoting international solidarity and peace. He was forced to stop only after the Great Depression decimated his fortune.
Over the past two years, though, her knack for attention gathering, and her determination to create the kind of off-kilter, exclusive, cooler-than-everything-else scene that has defined earlier moments in Manhattan — but this time with herself at its center — has eclipsed everything else.
As Mr. McNamara put it, she models “a very particular kind of New York glamour: the girl from Montana who comes here and somehow is wearing a $3,000 dress and all she has to her name is this roll of quarters.”
“We all want that New York,” he said.
Parker’s larger point is to show how older ways of experiencing the seasons continue to run steadily through our lives, even if we don’t quite register the tug. This lovely book acts as a portal back to an older time, using the poetry of medieval England to unlock a world where the seasons, and the changing weather, are a subject of deep pleasure and renewing wonder.
As Keith Fisher shows in “A Pipeline Runs Through It”, a sprawling, painstakingly researched history of oil from the Palaeolithic era to the first world war, black gold has been as much a curse as a blessing for the people on whose land it has been found. Oil has always been a dirty business, both literally and metaphorically.