Jim Shulman on Home Depot Art Supplies

The current issue of the New Yorker includes a profile of Mark Bradford, one of the hottest painters of the decade. While his works now fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars, his success was hardly an overnight phenomenon: he worked in his mother’s beauty salons for...

Jim Shulman on A Day I’d Never Imagined

One day in the early 1990s I was paging through Hemmings Motor News, the bible of the antique car hobby, when I came across a surprising advertisement: an eighth-page ad for the Lambda Car Club, which simply proclaimed, “The Name Says It All”. It certainly did. I had...

Jim Shulman on Ashley Madison and Math Problems

Remember those glorious math problems from elementary school, along the lines of, “If you have an appetite where can eat three watermelons every day, how many watermelons can you eat during April?” I thought of this the other day, not just because I used to flunk...

Jim Shulman on Mom and Hitchhiking Robots

Probably the strangest story of the week concerned a “hitchhiking” Canadian robot, which was traversing the US along similar lines to a recent European hitchhiking tour. While the hitchhiking lawn gnome tours are old news (and, surprisingly, none of the robot stories...

Jim Shulman on the Prize Bicycle

Back in the dark ages—1971—my junior high school announced a fundraising program for some worthy cause (Cheerleader uniforms? Football team trips? Whatever..) to be funded through a magazine subscription drive. For those readers under 40, these were very common events...