Katherine Dunn didn’t really make a living from her fiction until 1987, when, at forty-two, she sold Geek Love, her third published novel, to Sonny Mehta at Knopf for twenty-five thousand dollars—a windfall that briefly swept away her persistent financial concerns. Dunn had relied on all sorts of ways to make ends meet while she was coming up as a writer. At eighteen years old, in 1963, she sold fake magazine subscriptions door-to-door in the Midwest until she was arrested in Missouri for trying to cash a client’s fraudulent check. As a college student, first at Portland State and later at Reed, she worked as a topless dancer, a nude model for art students, and a writer of fellow students’ term papers. She also hustled pool.

After her first novel, Attic, was published in 1970, Dunn got a gig in Manhattan writing scripts for Warner Brothers. She returned to Portland in 1976, after years of travel. There she tended bar at the Earth Tavern, a dive-bar-slash-rock venue frequented by hippies, bikers, and merchant marines. She wrote a question-and-answer column for Willamette Week, the local Portland alt-weekly, and covered local boxing.

But, mostly, as she struggled to make it as a fiction writer, Dunn waited tables, most notably at the Stepping Stone Cafe, a terrific Northwest Portland diner. When I stopped there last summer on a trip doing research for a biography about Dunn, it felt like it probably hadn’t changed much since she worked there in the seventies and eighties. Back then, the only day care she could afford for her young son, Eli Dapolonia, was a seat at the counter while she poured coffee and charmed customers.

18/04/2022, 14:28, CT Angiogram renal & abdominal

No vascular calcification.

No renal calculi.

The kidneys are symmetrical in size (right = 11.1 cm; left = 11.0 cm) and normal in morphology.

There are few footballers that treat the ball with such intimate respect as Ivan Toney. Marcus and Luke discuss his sparkling form and Tammy Abraham’s struggles to we determine if we're 'Team Toney' or 'Team Tammy' ahead of the World Cup!

In the second half, José Mourinho steps up for examination on this week’s Take Thermometer - as do you! Because we’re finally rating your most honest takes on the England team.

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September 16 – October 30, 2022

September 10 – October 29, 2022

Peter Schjeldahl, whose exuberant prose and perceptive mind made him one of the most widely read art critics in the U.S., has died at 80.

He had been battling lung cancer, and he chronicled his experience with the disease in a memorable 2019 essay called “The Art of Dying” that appeared in the New Yorker, the publication for which he had served as head art critic since 1998.

The New Yorker confirmed Schjeldahl’s death in a tweet on Friday evening.

For the past half-century, Schjeldahl made sure to address the most important shows around New York, as well as, on occasion, ones outside the city. Reading his criticism, one got a sense for which shows truly mattered in a scene that is overcrowded with retrospectives, blockbuster exhibitions, and big solo shows.

Much of the appeal of Schjeldahl’s writing is its stylishness. Schjeldahl had gotten his start as a poet and, because of that, his writing has a different feel from most other art critics’. Often, his reviews were rid of art jargon, causing them to be legible to a larger audience, even when he was dealing with conceptual work.

Fast fashion juggernaut Shein launched a new collection inspired by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo Thursday. However, the Chinese online retailer’s collaboration is with the Frida Kahlo Corporation, a Panamanian licensing and commercialization company that has been fighting with members of the artist’s family for almost ten years over trademark and property rights. 

The news of the Shein x Frida Kahlo collaboration was first reported by the Spanish daily newspaper El País. 

The new collaboration appears to be the latest episode in the ongoing dispute between FKC and some of Kahlo’s relatives.

In 1954, Frida Kahlo died without a will. Kahlo’s property rights were inherited by her niece, Isolda Pinedo Kahlo, according to Mexican law. Isolda Pinedo Kahlo’s daughter, Maria Cristina Romeo Pinedo, was then granted power of attorney over these rights in 2003. The following year, Pinedo and others formed The Frida Kahlo Corp. with the primary objective of “licensing and commercializing the ‘Frida Kahlo’ brand worldwide.”

In 2018, a story by Reeves Wiedeman for New York magazine detailed the haunting account of a couple, who after buying a valuable home in a New Jersey suburb, became the targets of an anonymous stalker. Taunting Derek and Maria Broaddus via anonymous letters signed, “The Watcher,” the author delivered menacing references to their three children and specifics on their domestic lives gathered in drive-bys to the home.

A fictionalized version of the saga is played out in a new Netflix limited series produced by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. It follows the descent of married couple, Dean and Nora Brannock (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts), as they purge their lifesavings to buy a historic mansion outside of New York City. The Brannocks find themselves unable to sell it to escape the anonymous threats. Further menacing the couple’s polished lifestyle throughout the series is an increasingly dire financial situation.

The series delivers a cautionary tale about upper middle class excess and contains subtexts about a milleu of contemporary afflictions: financial security, market uncertainties, class wars, generational infighting, and paranoia.

Further stoking Murphy and Brennan’s riffs on class tensions afflicting metropolitan elites: the producers draw out a subplot that taps into art world caricatures that ushers in some of the show’s campiest moments.

Executing the bulk of the series memorable lines is a real-estate agent and art school-grad named Karen played by Jennifer Coolidge (the actress has gained a recent cult following for her portrayals of cheap anti-heroines). As the agent listing the sprawling property, Karen runs into Nora at the open house, recognizing each other from their days at RISD. Nora quips about her first major show at a new gallery in Tribeca for which she was featured in the Times.