Narrator Paul Gauguins life was the stuff of romantic fiction a tale as exotic and astonishing as his paintings. Born in france, he was raised in peru. A sailor in his teens, a stockbroker in his twenties, by the age of 35 he was a married father of four and a colltor of paintings he bought wo from Edouard Manet and the impressionists Camille Pissarro and edgar degas. And then, a plot twist. In 1882, seid by the desire to create rather than collect art, he cast it all away. Rejecting the fetters of bourgeois society, he began a search for artistic purity that would last r the rest of his life. He scoured the most remote areas of france and its colonies for subjects, restlessly scraping away the veneer of civilization to search for deeper truths and redefine the course of painting. And he died in poverty only to be widely recognized as a genius later generatis. But gauguiwas more than a character in his story. He was the creator of paul gauguin, the visionary artist and mythmaker. From
More detroit . Well look at the upsides and the down sides of an ever more urban world. Weve got a terrific battle that has some surprising ideas. Also, les miserables. It turns out that the book by victor hugo is the alltime favorite novel of a middle eastern leader that the west counts as an enemy. I will explain. But first, heres my take. We are watching a season of discontent in a world of young democracies, from egypt to turkey to brazil. Protest marches and one coup. As we watched the turbulence around the world, i think about our own democratic journey and how interesting it is that the distinctive feature of the american system is not how democratic it is, but rather, how undemocratic it is. Hear me out we have three coequal branches of government. And the one with the final say on many issues, the Supreme Court is composed of nine unelected men and women. The American Senate is the most unrepresentative upper house in the democratic universe, with the exception of britains hou