theatlantic:

What Does Your Favorite Wes Anderson Movie Say About You?

With the advent of Wes Anderson’s latest entry into his compendium of eight—the movie Moonrise Kingdom, out in New York and Las Angeles Friday—there’s enough of a catalog to ensure that there’s one for each of us. So, what’s your favorite Wes Anderson film? You would be amazed at what your preferences say about who you are, at least according to this entirely unscientific but completely authoritative exploration:

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

You like bands that other people like, but you only like their really obscure stuff. When you describe a piece of art or something as “difficult,” you mean it as a compliment. You probably have a graduate degree in something specific or you just work at a used book store. You want to move to Portland but you just haven’t done it yet. Sometimes people call you an asshole and you respond, “All I’m saying is that it’s important to understand what the term ‘craft beer’actually means.” If you’re a straight guy (and you probably are) you have a girlfriend named Cara who is a research assistant and wants to move to France, but not Paris. When you have a kid (not with Cara), it will have, for a first name, the last name of a writer you like. (Maybe Wallace, because you love Infinite Jest.) One summer when you were a kid you spent a month with your cousins at their island house in Maine and something big happened that you never told anyone else.

Read more.

And if your answer is that you don’t like Wes Anderson films, what does that say about you? That you’re a philistine?

newyorker:

When Art and Politics Meet …and Drink Organic Vodka: Downtown for Democracy’s “The Pocket Guide to Politics”

“The Pocket Guide”—a five-by-seven-inch seventy-five-page book in which art works are paired with dry, sometimes facile descriptions of how the American government functions—is an experiment in combatting a “lack of interest and engagement in the electoral process among creative professionals,” by providing basic definitions of things like lobbyists, gun control, and the electoral college. It is also, to borrow a phrase coined by Didion, an exercise in insider baseball. The assumption is that no introductions are necessary: everyone who purchases this primer on American politics (from places like the OHWOW bookstore and the über-hip Opening Ceremony boutique) will recognize some of the fourteen artists who contributed nineteen illustrations—or at least they’ll pretend to.

Click-through for more about the pocket guide, and to see a slideshow of it’s contents: http://nyr.kr/Jz1gAw

theweekmagazine:

The week’s best photojournalism
In some of the week’s most vivid images an incense-maker dries rose petals, a Mauritanian police officer rests in a tent , visitors cross a new elevated walkway constructed over a tiger’s pen, and members of the English National Ballet pose for an unlikely publicity photo.