Things Noted Here and There

Arthur Lubow,"Bernini's Genius," Smithsonian, October, features the remarkable baroque architecture and sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Jenny Uglow,"Brave New World," Guardian, 11 October, reviews Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

Jill Lepore,"Rock, Paper, Scissors," New Yorker, 13 October, is a fine essay on the American electoral system as a patchwork of adjustments:

That we grant our rulers the right to govern us is the genius of eighteenth-century republicanism. That we all can vote is a consequence of nineteenth-century politics. That we vote secretly is the Gilded Age's answer to universal manhood suffrage. How our votes are counted is, generally, a product of twentieth-century technology. ... It really is patches all the way down. In places—like the Electoral College—the patchwork gets pretty shoddy.
Still, a patch, even a patch upon a patch, isn't necessarily bad.

Richard Rayner,"The Truman Show," LA Times, 11 October, reviews Capote's Portraits and Observations -- The Essays of Truman Capote. Hat tip.