Martin Schneider writes:

There's a very intriguing festival starting today and running through Saturday in New York City for those who can attend. (I expect to attend multiple events myself. If you spot me, by all means say hello!)

It's the Festival of New French Writing at NYU's Hemmerdinger Hall on Washington Square. All events are free of charge, all events will interestingly pair a prominent French intellectual or writer with an American counterpart, and all in attendance will receive a free Renault Wind Gordini. (One of these facts is not true, but I'm not telling which.)

My knowledge of recent French writing is pretty paltry (starts with Houellebecq and ends with Carrère, neither of whom will attend), but if the (continued)

Martin Schneider writes:

A rash assertion: Ira Glass and Michael Lewis are the two best people in the world at discussing the recent financial collapse in front of a lay audience.

Glass is host and producer of This American Life and works often with (and helped found) the "Planet Money" podcast. Lewis's first book, Liar's Poker, was about the bond market and Salomon Brothers, and his most recent bestseller, The Big Short, is about the dysfunctional real estate market of the George W. Bush years. These men have both spent countless hours figuring out just the right way to express to regular, informed non-experts what went so catastrophically wrong on Wall Street a few years back.

On February 3 they appeared together at 92Y.

The event was not boring. Actually, it was fairly riveting.

Glass was interviewing Lewis on this night, and he assumed the role of the people's staunch advocate. He frequently (continued)

Jonathan Taylor writes:

Martin will be here with his weekly Wednesday events report, but I wanted to mention a couple of things myself.

Enough praise has been afforded to Christian Marclay's 24-hour montage of time as a character in cinema, The Clock, at Paula Cooper Gallery. The lines were long this weekend. But it's worth the wait: both exhilarating and magically relaxing. It suggests the wealth of human experience that has been represented on film, and even when the representation falls into repeated patterns, it only highlights the bristling variety of their expression. It ennobles every actor in every movie, no matter how bad, by turning them all into game walk-ons in a much greater project. (Update: As I left, I lamented that I was unlikely to see The Clock again anytime soon, once the show closes, and noted how odd that felt, given the ubiquity of video as a medium now. Felix Salmon has more on just this.)

Speaking of which, I was surprised how tremendously affecting I found John Adams's Nixon in China at the Met—perhaps amplified by the inevitable resonance between the opera's meditations on the ordinary makers of history, and events unfolding simultaneously in Egypt. As Nixon stammers early on, "News has a kind of mystery"—an immediate introduction to Alice Goodman's way of working the mundane into the poetic. I had read about Pat Nixon's intervention into Madame Mao's play within a play—a ballet choreographed here by Mark Morris—but had no idea how it would unfold into a nightmare of history.

As for lickspittles so urgently concerned about the mocking treatment of Kissinger—if this is his worst fate, then that really is unjust. (continued)

Martin Schneider writes:

This week in events, we have a conversation, a lecture, and a play.

The Conversation. The Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, dedicated to the art of the Himalayas, hosted a weekly series called "Talks on Nothing"; it started last October. By a stroke of luck, I happened to catch the very last one (there were 26 events in all) this past Saturday evening. The series has attracted luminaries of all sorts to the sedate stage of the Rubin, and the one I happened to see featured Raj Patel, a young economist of renown, and Peter Sellars, a less young stage and opera director of renown. Patel has recently written a book called (continued)