Happy days and times

Art Spiegelman American author and illustrator   In 1980 he cofounded   Raw , a  underground comic and   graphics   anthology, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. In it the pair sought to present   graphic novels   and “ comix” (comics written for a mature audience) to a wider public. Recognized as the leading avant-garde comix journal of its era,   Raw   featured strips by European artists as well as previewed Spiegelman’s own work. Beginning in   Raw ’s second issue (December 1980), Spiegelman resumed the story of   Maus , in which he related the wartime experiences of his parents, Vladek and Anja, both survivors of the   Auschwitz   death camp . Compelling in its   ironic   anthropomorphic   animal depictions—the Jews and Nazis are drawn with the faces of mice and cats,  respectively—its historical   veracity , and its personal accounts, the story is made more complex by its contemporary framework. ...

  Art, science, and  nature If  garden  and landscape design is concerned with the relations between humankind and nature, it is largely determined by one or the other of the conflicting philosophies about how human beings do or should relate to nature. People know that they are  biologically and physiologically the products of natural evolution, yet their great technological accomplishments lead them to feel that they are above, beyond, or outside nature, that they have conquered and dominated the wilderness and have it now within their power to remake the world. Every work of garden and landscape design reflects one or the other of these conflicting attitudes. The  Japanese garden , for example, is inspired by the notion of humans as a part of nature, the Renaissance garden by the idea that humans are nature’s masters. Garden and landscape design thus reveals much about a  culture  and a period. One result of the impact of the environmental move...