![newsweek:
A Brooklyn Heights playground was renamed to Adam Yauch Park today, in honor of the dearly departed Beastie Boy. [via]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/9220cc5a47a14bbeddcc2776afb54a53/tumblr_mm8drktp4v1qzs5cqo1_500.jpg)
© ladislav sutnar - build the town building blocks - 1940
I would really like a set of these. Sutnar doesn’t get enough attention. And he was a friend of my grandfather’s, so double the reasons to reblog.
10 Days, 10 Covers: Each day, from now until our January 28th relaunch, we’re showcasing a significant, evocative vintage cover from The New Republic’s nearly 100-year history.
A week after President Kennedy’s assassination, the editors of The New Republic felt the shock of his death keenly enough to be at a loss for words. The excerpt printed on the December 7, 1963 cover—from new-President Johnson’s eulogy for Kennedy—demonstrated the nation’s conflicting emotions: utter despair at the loss of the young president, and an urge to “continue” on with his ambitious plans.
As a kid I would often watch my grandfather, Noel Martin, work. As I watched he would tell stories. One day, while flipping through a faded manila envelope, he pulled out proofs for a cover very similar to what we see above, and told me about the time he redesigned the New Republic in 1958. Like it was something they asked everyone to do now and then. Some of the proofs he showed me are part of the Noel Martin Collection at the University of Cincinnati.
He always added, that after The New Republic debuted its new look, he received a call from Bill Buckley, at National Review. Apparently Buckley was so impressed with the look of the magazine that he wanted my grandfather to redesign National Review as well. After meeting with Buckley, my grandfather wished him well, but told him that as a lifelong Democrat, he just couldn’t take the job.
ITS A BAD BRAINS CHRISTMAS, CHARLIE BROWN.
I have spent over half my life serving people, starting as a dishwasher when I was fifteen. In the past fifteen years I’ve been a busser, a hostess, a waitress, a cocktail server, a deli worker, a prep cook, and now a cheese clerk. Rule number one of the service industry is the same thing they tell nurses in nursing school: don’t talk about yourself to the patient. In other words, people are coming to you to ask your expert opinion about cheese or their blood pressure or whatever—they’re not coming to you to get to know you as a three-dimensional human being. They don’t care who you are.
Until I worked with a certain woman at a busy Italian restaurant in my early twenties, I’d always taken it for granted that everyone knew this rule. She was my own age but had never worked in a restaurant before. She’d just graduated from college with a degree in English and dance.
One night after work, she and I went out for a drink to commiserate. “I’m running around pouring people water,” she said, “and clearing their plates and everything, and it’s like—they don’t know anything about me. They don’t know I’m really a dancer.”
I stared at her for a minute and took another sip of beer. “You don’t want them to know that,” I said.
“But they look at me and think I’m just a hostess. That that’s all I am.”
“Honey,” I said, feeling for the first time like a veteran of the service industry, “that knowledge is what’s yours to keep. That’s your treasure. Keeping that private is the only way you’re going to keep from going crazy.”
