William Pope.L, The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, 2001–2009. Photo: William Pope.L, Pruznick/Grey.

• All hail Zardulu! She appears in ceremonial robes around Gotham, begging mortals to serve as “tools” in her “grand architectural designs.” And these designs … they may seem, from the outside, like they’re just viral videos. But they’re a new body of myths. Andy Newman reports: “The artist calls herself Zardulu. Her medium is the elaborately staged viral video. As to her own identity, Zardulu will say only that she was born in Manhattan in 1971 … She has been revealed as the force behind the Selfie Rat, who achieved world fame for appearing to take a self-portrait with a passed-out man’s phone on a subway platform. She has been suspected as the creator of the even more famous Pizza Rat, caught dragging a slice down subway stairs in September, though another man claims credit for that video … She does, however, have plenty to say in a more general way about the enduring power of mystery. Like: ‘I think creation and perpetuation of modern myths is a tragically underappreciated art form. It upsets me when I hear people refer to them as lies.’ ”
• Let’s face it, the flâneur is a white guy. He strolls, he gazes, he observes—he takes these luxuries as his due. What would black flânerie look like? Doreen St. Félix starts with the artist William Pope.L, who “prostrated himself on New York City’s Broadway Avenue for nine years, intermittently. He called the performances ‘crawls.’ Dressed in a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back, the tall, thin, statistically average-looking black American man would crawl on the sidewalk as long as weather and upper body strength allowed, which never exceeded six blocks. Known as The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street(2001–2009), Pope.L’s drama featuring varyingly proscribed cosmopolitan movements—those of the disabled, of the homeless, of commuting black Americans—attracted dramatics from his unwitting public as well. A cameraman documented most of the odd sojourn and the reactions, which ranged in horror, boredom, disgust, delight, and confusion. One passing black pedestrian stopped, so incensed by Pope.L’s state that he nearly kicked the artist in the face.”
• The grammar handbook is a hard sell. How to get people to care about the serial comma? How to reinvigorate the art of the nonrestrictive which? Frank L. Cioffi’s book goes all Solzhenitsyn on the problem; it’s called One Day in the Life of the English Language, and it shows us the horrors of the labor camp called usage: “It illustrates points about grammar and punctuation using examples drawn from newspapers and magazines all published—online or in print—on December 29, 2008 (hence talk of the financial crisis, the election of Barack Obama, strife between Israel and Palestine). And its author, Frank L. Cioffi, who teaches writing at Baruch College in New York City, is humble. His aim is not so much to enforce rules as to provoke debate. He wants you to look beyond the meaning of the sentence to the choices made by the writer and the editor.”
• Today in libraries and the delicate art of assertion: “The San Jose Public Library wants its books back. And its CDs and DVDs. Taken altogether, library patrons are holding onto or have damaged 97,000 items and owe the city $6.8 million in fines and fees. The situation is so out of control that about 40 percent of the city’s library cardholders can no longer borrow anything until they return their library holdings and pay what they owe. For a library, this is a DEFCON moment. Maybe not DEFCON 1, but at least DEFCON 3 … Over the years, libraries have fined patrons for not bringing back books and offered no-questions-asked return periods. They’ve published the names of book scofflaws in local newspapers. They’ve paid personal calls on people who hold onto books past their due dates, and even sicced the police on particularly recalcitrant readers. And they still don’t really know how to get their books back.”
• Remember King Philip’s War? Not firsthand—it happened in the seventeenth century. But it’s a grisly and oft-forgotten chapter in American colonial history: “In terms of percentages, King Philip’s War is the most violent in our national history, and ignoring the per capita numbers, it was in its ferocity and almost gothic horror perhaps the most genuinely violent event in the whole American narrative … We have never really recovered from the trauma … King Phillips War has more than a whiff of the allegorical about it, it is a typological example of a recurring event in American history, a chapter in the dubious sacred scripture of our civil religion, and we witness its continuing battles every day.”