A popular downtown artist in the 1960s, she worked in obscurity after art world trends left her behind. Now her startlingly fresh work is on view again.

Creating rules around the content we consume can help calm our overtaxed brains and manage our moods.

Trump’s tariffs erect a wall between Americans and other people, obstructing the flow not only of goods but also of ideas, contacts, technology and friendships.

Why people do things that are unpleasantly hard.

A painter and a former journalist have teamed up to demonstrate the city’s shift from relative openness to tighter controls on freedoms of expression.

His artwork paid tribute to its surroundings, in New York City and elsewhere, rendering nature at an oversized scale that made it unmissable.

Ovid has raced through the destruction of Troy and its nobility, including the death of Priam, the herding together of the Trojan women to be taken as trophies, and the vicious murder of Astyanax.

As the Greek ships prepare to depart, Priam’s widow Hecuba is the last to board. Her youngest son Polydorus has been secretly in the care of King Polymestor in Thrace, who was paid a great sum to protect him. With Troy destroyed and that source of income lost, Polymestor slit the child’s throat and threw his body into the sea.

The Greek fleet shelters off the coast of Thrace, again waiting for favourable winds. While there, the ghost of Achilles appears and demands the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena in appeasement.

As with Iphigenia’s sacrifice a decade earlier, it’s now the turn of Hecuba’s daughter to be sacrificed to secure good weather. Polyxena is taken from the arms of her mother and put before the altar where Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, stands ready with his knife. Polyxena pleads eloquently for her body to be given to her mother without a ransom, a speech bringing even the priest to tears. Nevertheless, he thrusts the knife into her breast, and she falls to her knees, still resolute, but dead. The Trojan women mourn her and care for her body, so her mother can embrace her in final farewell. Hecuba then responds in a long speech of lament.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s fine painting of Hecuba and Polyxena, from after 1814, is superb in its treatment of fabrics, but more puzzling in its narrative. Hecuba, the older woman, appears to have fainted, presumably at the announcement of Polyxena’s imminent sacrifice, with her daughter kneeling at her feet.

Several paintings show the sacrifice of Polyxena, of which Charles Le Brun’s from 1647 is arguably the finest, and in superb condition. Polyxena is being led to the altar as Hecuba tries to hold her back. Behind Polyxena is the same Neoptolemus who threw Astyanax to his death, threatening to kill her where she is.

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli’s The Sacrifice of Polyxena, from about the same time, shows the moment the priest is about to sink his knife into the woman’s breast. A young assistant, their head averted, kneels ready with a large bowl to catch the sacrificial blood.

Hecuba then walks down to the beach for a jar of seawater, and stumbles across the body of her son Polydorus. She is initially struck dumb, and freezes like a rock with the shock. As that subsides, her wrath grows. She makes her way to meet with Polymestor, on the pretext of wanting to show him some hidden gold. He immediately starts lying to her, so she flies at him, burying her fingers deep into his eyes to blind him. She is then stoned by Thracians, and is transformed into a dog, and that place is named Cynossema, the dog’s tomb.

The Vengeance of Hecuba is a magnificent Macao tapestry from the seventeenth century, showing Hecuba and three other women sealing Polymestor’s fate for his murder of Polydorus. Hecuba is poking his eyes out, as the others swing long wooden clubs at him.

Giuseppe Crespi probably painted his version of Hecuba kills Polymestor in the early eighteenth century. His skilful composition makes it a chilling but carefully implicit image, as a woman associate holds the king down, and Hecuba reaches up to remove his eyes. Crespi has minimised the amount of limb visible in the upper part of the painting, to keep the composition there clean and clear. He seems to have compensated for that in the legs of the lower half, made even more complex by deep shadow.

The goddess Aurora joins in the lament over the destruction of Troy. She had not only supported the Trojan cause, but her son Memnon had been killed by Achilles in combat. She is stricken with grief, and can’t bear to watch his cremation on the funeral pyre. She kneels before Jupiter and begs him that her dead son might be granted an honour. Jupiter agrees, and the smoke from Memnon’s pyre darkens the whole sky, as might have happened during a major volcanic eruption. That smoke is then transformed into a flock of birds, the Memnonides, in honour of Memnon.

Bernard Picart’s engraving from the early eighteenth century of Memnon, son of Eos and Tithonus shows a young warrior in Egypt, looking into Aurora’s dawn light. He may be sat on his own sarcophagus too.

The two colossi at Al Bairat near Luxor in Egypt were known in classical times, and became popular motifs for ‘orientalist’ artists in the nineteenth century, several of whom show them in dramatic lighting.

Gustav W. Seitz’s Egypt: the Statues of Memnon, seen here as a colour lithograph of his original watercolour, is highly atmospheric, and an excellent demonstration of the moon illusion.

The colours in Charles Vacher’s watercolour of The Statues of the Memnons (1864) are superb.

Finally, Albert Zimmermann’s oil painting of The Memnon Statues captures the heat haze, and a snake moving through the water.

After two humorous stories poking fun at King Midas, Ovid makes a start on the central theme for much of the remainder of his Metamorphoses, retelling the myths about Troy, and how its fall led to the foundation of Rome. This begins with the foundation and fall of the first city of Troy, leading into the birth of Achilles.

Once Apollo had won his musical contest against Pan, he made his way to Laomedon’s kingdom, where he found the king struggling to build the great walls of the first city of Troy. Apollo and Neptune agreed to lend a hand, but when the walls were complete, Laomedon denied striking any bargain to repay the gods for their labour.

One of the few works showing the story of Laomedon is thought to have been painted by Joachim von Sandrart and Girolamo Troppa in the late seventeenth century. Its close-cropped figures show Laomedon Refusing Payment to Poseidon and Apollo. The youthful Apollo holds his hand out at the left, while behind him the much older Neptune leans forward next to his trident.

Neptune responded by flooding the city. In a scene reminiscent of Andromeda being offered for sacrifice to the sea-monster Cetis, Laomedon’s daughter Hesione was then chained to rocks to await her grizzly fate. When she was rescued by Hercules, Laomedon again welshed on his debt, so Hercules gave Hesione to Telamon.

In Hans Thoma’s Hercules Delivering Hesione (1890) Hercules stands on the beach in front of the early city of Troy, his trademark club in his right hand. A naked Telamon is busy keeping the sea monster at bay by throwing boulders at it, while Hercules is bargaining with the fair Hesione.

Ovid’s story then switches to that of Telamon’s brother, Peleus, who married Thetis, one of the fifty Nereid daughters of the ancient sea god Nereus. She had been told by Proteus that her son’s deeds would be famous, and even Jupiter had left her to his grandson Peleus to marry. Thetis used to ride naked astride a dolphin to visit the remote sea cave where she slept. Peleus found her there, and tried to rape her. But she used her powers of transformation to escape his clutches, first turning into a bird, then a tree, next a tigress. Peleus pleaded with the sea gods for their help, and Proteus told him to bind her with ropes while she was still asleep. When he did that, she relented, and they were married.

According to other sources, their wedding was celebrated with a great feast on Mount Pelion, and attended by most of the gods. The happy couple were given many gifts by the gods, but one, Eris the goddess of discord, hadn’t been invited. As an act of spite at her exclusion, she threw a golden apple ‘of discord’ into the middle of the goddesses, to be given as a reward to ‘the fairest’. This set up the Judgement of Paris, and led to the Trojan War.

Cornelis van Haarlem’s The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis from 1593 segregates the deities into a separate feast in a sacred grove on the left. There is, as yet, no sign of discord among them, nor of any golden apple. Some of the gods are still among the other guests in the foreground, including Pan (near his pipes, at the left) and Mercury, with his winged hat and caduceus at the right. They seem to be having a good time.

Joachim Wtewael’s undated painting of The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis is great fun, with its aerial band, and numerous glimpses of deities behaving badly. I think that I can also spot Eris, about to sow her apple of discord into their midst: she is in mid-air to the left of centre, the apple held out in her right hand.

Hendrick van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Elder combined their skills to paint The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus together in about 1630. Here it’s the innumerable putti who seem to be running riot, and there’s no sign of Eris or her golden apple.

It’s the most modern version, painted by Edward Burne-Jones as The Feast of Peleus in 1872-81, that sticks most closely to the story. In a composition based on classical representations of the Last Supper, he brings Eris in at the far right, her golden apple still concealed. Every head has turned towards her, apart from that of the centaur behind her right wing. Even the three Fates, in the left foreground, have paused momentarily in their work.

The most famous painting of this event doesn’t show the wedding at all, only the introduction of the golden apple to the feast of the gods.

This is Jacob Jordaens’ Golden Apple of Discord from 1633, based on a brilliant oil sketch by Rubens. The facially discordant Eris, seen in midair behind the deities, has just made her gift of the golden apple, now at the centre of the grasping hands above the table. At the left, Minerva (Pallas Athene) reaches forward for it. In front of her, Venus, her son Cupid at her knee, points to herself as the goddess most deserving of the apple. On the other side of the table, Juno reaches her hand out for it too, leading on to the Judgement of Paris.

其实有点出乎我意料，除了 Apple Vision Pro 那期，最受欢迎的居然是聊《九龙城寨》和《暗恋桃花源》的这两期。而且，刚发的《谈判专家》这期的收听量也在稳定上涨。聊 AI 那期尽管内容很多，但收听量比这些都少得多。

从博客后台数据能看到，最近一周的主要收听量中，三分之二都来自这三期聊戏聊剧的节目。

我原本以为，收听我节目的主要人群，是过去在知乎和 B站看我讲设计的读者和观众。

这么看下来，我有一个猜测：收听我播客的人群当中，有很大一部分比例，可能是此前并不认识我的路人，他们对科技类话题的兴趣，没有对娱乐类型的话题高。

挺好的，这也挺符合我最初对播客的预期，这样我就可以不用老聊设计和产品了！

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