In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sigh, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro.
In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves.
It finally snowed a bit in Omaha, and on Christmas Day, no less — a bit of temporary relief. I’m not worried that my grandchildren, if they ever materialize, will grow up not knowing what snow is, as my friend suggested. But I wonder if, somewhere down the line, one of my descendants will build the last snowman in Omaha.
Ultimately, though, becoming a crossing guard is as close as I’ve ever gotten to balancing my art and mental health and money. In fact, after working this job for six months, I’m not sure my dream is to be a 100 percent butt-in-chair novelist anymore. I like being out in the world and interacting with people. And—bonus!—I’ve got a whole new set of experiences and material to pull from.
If you’re a gardener, that’s a siren song for you. What will you put in your pots and plots this spring? What colors will you have, what crops will you harvest? It never gets old: put a seed no bigger than a breadcrumb into some dirt and it becomes dinner in just weeks. All it needs, as in the new memoir “The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation” by Raquel Willis, is a little time to grow.