Weekend Reading: New York, New Yorker

Check out the New York Public Library's digital collection. Once they get their server problems fixed, it should be awesome, and I mean that quite literally. From the New York Times:

So far, about 275,000 items are online, and you can browse by subject, by collection, by name or by keyword. The images first appear in thumbnail pictures, a dozen to a page. Some include verso views. You can collect 'em, enlarge 'em, download 'em, print 'em and hang 'em on your wall at home. All are free, unless, of course, you plan to make money on them yourself. (Permission is required.)

The NYT also has a feature today on religious bloggers.

Adam Gopnik's piece "Voltaire's Garden" is online, but if it wasn't, it would still be worth the price of the New Yorker this week all by itself. I found this sentence fascinating:

Although no single volume in English does justice to all the Voltaires, the second, scientific Voltaire, at least, inspired one of the most blissfully entertaining books in the language, Nancy Mitford’s 1954 “Voltaire in Love,” an account of his great affair with Mme. Châtelet and of their joint introduction to the pleasures of sex and calculus.

OK, I'm going to have to read that book, if only to find out when they engaged in calculus: pre- or post-? (Or, God help us, mid-.)

And no one but Gopnik can write sentences like this:

Voltaire was in favor of a benign, supervisory God in the way that British leftists used to be in favor of the Queen, or in the way that Yankee free agents are in favor of Joe Torre; it’s nice to think that someone genial is overseeing things.

Read the whole thing. Have a nice weekend.