Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
12 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think he does, as I say somewhere in the book — we fill it in a little bit, but he basically died in front of his easel.”
02 / belief
“I’m hanging out with the wrong people. I think I need to run with a rougher crowd.”
03 / prediction
“I think that the idea of free trade — and I know you’re an economist, so you know more about this than I do — but the idea of free trade is, “Let’s just figure out where it’s cheaper to make this.”
04 / evaluation
“Every time somebody is a little uptight or conservative or not as fun, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s because you’re such a Calvinist.”
05 / evaluation
“It’s going for three or four times the estimate, but half of the paintings are not being sold. That means that whereas, with these contemporary auctions, you have this totally hideous-looking stuff that sells for $50 million, and you think, for $50 million you can buy a lot of Dutch paintings.”
06 / preference
“It’s totally decent, I think, to live there. It’s easier than it would be to live in the northeast, but I love the northeast.”
07 / evaluation
“If you go from midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn, you have the same distance [as from Amsterdam to Utrecht]. It’s 40, 45 minutes door-to-door, but it’s much quieter and smaller, even though you also have everything because it’s a university town.”
08 / evaluation
“Then at a very, very, very great distance, you have all the poor people, millions of them. It’s quite disconcerting if you know Brazil because one of the things about Brazil that makes it both scary in certain moments, but also really dynamic in other moments, is that despite the massive class differences — which are humongous, of course, and that has a racial component as well — you’re always quite .”
09 / recommendation
“The Dutch collected him later, really, and there were obsessive Rembrandt collectors who — actually would be a good book for someone to write about the collectors of Rembrandt because some of them were completely bonkers and obsessive, like a lot of collectors.”
10 / commitment
“He is an almost oedipal figure for me, a father figure, someone that I knew very well when I was younger. I venerated him, and I think I became a writer because of him.”
11 / evaluation
“I think I say it in the book, that if you go through Dutch galleries and museums, if you go through 20 different rooms and actually try to look at all the pictures, you’re going to get completely bored by the end of it because that’s just not the way they’re meant to be looked at.”
12 / evaluation
“Camille is a complex subject of her own, but she has an idea of herself that she needed to stay in the academy because she felt that teaching and interacting with actual humans was a way of preventing the aristocratic excesses of people like Susan Sontag, which I think is absolutely fair enough.”