culture

It started with a walk to the Whitney and a William Eggleston show, about which all I can say is how could a person who wants to buy a derelict gas station in the Ozarks not like these pictures. Especially in the company of someone from Greenwood, Mississippi, where many of them were taken who actually knew some of the characters in them. And as long as we were there, why not see the Calder show? And then some of our number went to the theater ("August: Osage County") to return to find a near prostrate WNYC reporter (we won't tell you her name but you can hear her on NPR news today), a TV producer and the author of Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America. Adam Cohen, a NYT editorial writer, now seems prescient to have started this book two years ago, and it couldn't have come out at a more perfect time: yesterday, just before the inauguration of a President who'd like to be Lincoln but who many hope will do the work of Roosevelt.