Whispered in July, rumored in December, and nearly shouted earlier this week, today marks the official announcement of Florida’s high-speed rail investment by the federal government. Many will talk about what this day means for a new age of American infrastructure, and even more, including my colleagues, will debate the overall efficacy of such an investment. For me, I’d rather get into some of the nitty-gritty of what appears to be, thanks to the president’s Tampa event, the flagship project in Florida. 

First off, there’s much to like for Florida’s current residents and future tourists. The Tampa and Orlando metropolitan areas, along with their sandwiched neighbor Lakeland, were home to almost 3.4 million people in 2008. That year their economies produced $230.6 billion of economic output, more than the Czech Republic. A huge part of this is the vibrant tourist industry: Few places in the world give visitors simultaneous access to many top theme parks, multiple world-class beaches, and bona fide big city culture all within 120 miles. A pleasurable and useful train ride won’t just benefit Floridians, and could become an additional beacon to visitors across the country.

Florida also offers the Federal Railroad Administration, the official administrator of the high speed rail (HSR) stimulus grants, a well-prepared recipient. Florida already owns over 90 percent of the route’s right-of-way, they’ve already completed the environmental impact assessment, and the deal is structured to take advantage of private donations and operational risk. Just as importantly, Florida projects to open the line in 2015, making sure these funds get spent in short order and users will see the benefits quickly. Florida also has wanted this for some time; they originally passed a ballot initiative back in 2000.

But, let’ be clear--this isn’t a perfect plan. A major problem is that the Orlando Convention Center station is over eight miles from a soon-to-open SunRail commuter rail station. This disconnect represents a missed opportunity for intermodal linkage, especially since SunRail reaches downtown Orlando and the HSR route does not. Intermodal links, including the ease by which one can rent a car at the HSR stations, are critical in a state like Florida that’s been developed in an auto-centric manner.

The Sun

Lorber Films

The Wedding Song

Strand Releasing

Act of God

Zeitgeist Films

The pace is adagio, the temper contemplative, so it is all the more surprising that the subject is Emperor Hirohito of Japan during the brief period between Hiroshima and surrender. The Sun was made by the Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who is noted, among other reasons, for the slow tempo of his films. Except for his feature-length careering through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Russian Ark), he has often chosen to meditate on shots, making that meditation part of the picture’s progress. The Sun is quite different. This film never consciously pauses in the former Sokurov style, yet the atmosphere in which the action occurs seems contrapuntally thoughtful.

Trotsky

Robert Service

Harvard University Press, $35

When Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin, in 1940, the American novelist James T. Farrell took to the pages of Partisan Review to memorialize him. “The life of Leon Trotsky is one of the great tragic dramas of modern history,” Farrell’s obituary began, and it only gets more idolatrous from there. “Pitting his brain and will against the despotic rulers of a great empire, fully conscious of the power, the resources, the cunning and cruelty of his enemy, Trotsky had one weapon at his command--his ideas. His courage never faltered; his will never broke.”

This was the headline in the Jerusalem Post which, one might think, wouldn't be so finicky about the source of the attack on the Moscow-St. Petersburg railway that left at least 26 dead, about 100 wounded and 18 missing, presumed also gone to their maker. This mass homicide was a massacre, and I assume it was carried out by...well, take your choice.

Maurice Bowra: A Life

By Leslie Mitchell

(Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $50)

As warden of Wadham College in Oxford, president of the British Academy, the author of well-known books on ancient Greek literature, and a conversationalist of legendary brilliance, Maurice Bowra seemed, in the middle of the last century, the very embodiment of Oxford life. Enjoying a huge international reputation as a scholar, a wit, and an administrator, he was duly elected into prestigious academies and awarded honorary degrees in both Europe and America. George VI knighted him in 1951. Yet few who were not alive at that time know his name today. For those of the younger generation who are aware of him at all, his career conjures up the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, and it has been said that he was the model for Mr. Samgrass. A few of his bright remarks linger on among the chattering classes: "Buggers can’t be choosers," or "Where there’s death there’s hope," or "He is a man who has no public virtues and no private parts." But for the most part Bowra has sunk into oblivion, to emerge from time to time in an obituary or in the voluminous correspondence of Isaiah Berlin.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

By Jennifer Burns

(Oxford University Press, 459 pp., $27.95)

Ayn Rand and the World She Made

By Anne C. Heller              

(Doubleday, 559 pp., $35) 

I.

The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.

Picasso: Mosqueteros--Gagosian Gallery

Younger Than Jesus--New Museum

The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984--Metropolitan Museum of Art

Compass in Hand--Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition of Picasso's late work at the Gagosian Gallery this spring was a phenomenon. Day after day, Gagosian's huge space on West 21st Street attracted a remarkably heterogeneous public, a mix of artists, art students, Brooklyn hipsters, well-heeled professionals, and European and Asian tourists, gathered together in a way I do not recall seeing before, certainly not in Chelsea. People did not just come and look. They stayed and talked about the quickening, raucous power of the paintings and prints that Picasso was making in his late eighties and early nineties. Anything by Picasso is of course a draw, and it helped that John Richardson had organized the exhibition. He knew Picasso in his later years, and the Gagosian show, while it surely had its commercial motivations, was given an intellectual lift by Richardson, whose magnificent biography of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared, is written in a prose as elegant, easy, and exact as any being produced today.