Friday Odds & Sods is In a Class of Its Own

Another week passes away into history, and with it the month of February in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Fifteen.  Speaking for myself, this has been rather a time of waiting, one of the sensations I find least enjoyable in life, removing as it does the sense of agency found in hope and replacing instead with an anxiousness that soon turns into boredom. Waiting for spring, waiting for a call, waiting for anything, turns time from a space of events into merely a succession of featureless days that await the division into  "before" and "after." But one thing I promise that you will never have to wait for, Dear Reader, is this week's Odds & Sods

• Some historical articles for this weekend, for how can we prepare for the future if we are ignorant of the past?  To begin, two looks at the decline and fall of great artists, Orson Wells and Truman Capote.
• Second, the relationship between geography and destiny: How Portland became and stayed nearly all white, and how Easter Island shows both mankinds resilience and stupidity.
• Finally, the interaction between art, history, and memory through the lens of American Sniper.

Mo' Moai Mo' Problems