A Brush with Paul Gauguin on the Polynesian Island Hiva Oa

“Gauguin was a revolutionary,” says my tour guide Tim as we drive through the rainforests of Hiva Oa. “He fought against the local church, he fought for the rights of us Marquesans. He lived according to his own values, and we appreciate him here still.” With ornate geometrical tattoos covering his body, Tim is not the kind of guy you’d expect to wax poetically about a 19th century French painter

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Two New Museums for Tintin and Magritte

It’s an old parlor game: Can you name 10 famous Belgians? Belgium is a tiny nation, and often the butt of its neighbors’ jokes, but it can claim two 20th-century artistic giants who would make it onto that list: Hergé — or at least his globetrotting comic strip character Tintin — and René Magritte, the subversive surrealist painter

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Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Snow Porn Star, Dead at 56

People in the ’70s knew two things about Marilyn Chambers: that she had appeared as a model on an Ivory Snow box, fondly holding an infant under the corporate slogan “99 and 44/100% Pure”; and that she starred in Behind the Green Door, one of the first, weirdest and most popular hard-core movies in that brief period of the ’70s known as Porno Chic. These two factettes, with their colliding irony, made the blond, willowy Chambers the pin-up princess of XXX cinema, a notoriety she parlayed into a career in soft- and hard-core sex films that lasted from 1972 until..

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Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?

Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes? How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity

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Building Green Houses for the Poor

When most people hear the term “green building,” they probably imagine something like Bank of America’s soon-to-be-completed Midtown Manhattan headquarters. The skyscraper will have floor-to-ceiling insulating glass walls, automatic light dimming, water recycling, air filtration and on-site power generation

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