Friday, April 6, 2012

Friday Grab Bag: Gopnik on Camus & More Construction

Friday is a day for the Grab Bag, those items that get scooped up in the week's events and then cast onto the ground before us as the weekend looms.

Adam Gopnik shows up again here for his portrait of Albert Camus in the April 9th New Yorker.  Gopnik writes elegantly but not ostentatiously.  He is efficient without being parsimonious.  He lets his observations ride the waves of his words very well.

Meanwhile, his topic, Camus, is the perfect cliche of the French intellectual as seen through American eyes.  But he is more than that, and more than the writer who penned one of the great first lines of any book. Gopnik walks through all that, and I do recommend a look-see.

And in Cambridge, the new buildings keep coming, and the city continues to grow.  And grow.  And grow.  Below is a photo of yet another construction site along Binney Street, the third project being built as we write.    This time it is happening at the corner of Fulkerson.


Binney and Fulkerson Streets (April 2012)

Let it here be noted: At its edges, Cambridge is changing, massively and quickly.  It is happening in ways that will surprise us much when these buildings extrude themselves from the ground in boxes of concrete, steel and glass.