The French art dealer Michel Cohen cheated the New York art world out of $50 million and disappeared in 2001. The documentary filmmaker Vanessa Engle found him last year: “The first hit came in 2003: a small story in the US press. Cohen had been arrested, by Interpol, in Rio de Janeiro; he was in jail in Brazil. ‘I thought OK, now’s my chance, maybe the Brazilian authorities will let me into the prison, I can get the whole story, it’s going to happen,’ says Engle, reliving the excitement. She was on another project, but there was no hurry because he would be in prison for a long time. Then, later that year, she searched again and…he had escaped.”

In other news: A Renaissance masterpiece is discovered in a kitchen in France: “It was directly above a hotplate.”

Why are the Inuit killing themselves at an astonishing rate?

Do we need semicolons? Yes, says Joseph Epstein: “I don’t believe I used my first semicolon until the age of 24 or so, and then I didn’t use it confidently until a good while later, even though I had begun publishing in magazines at 22. To begin with, there was the appearance of the damn creature; with its period sitting atop a comma, it looked as if it had drifted over from Japanese or some other Asian language. The short-story writer Donald Barthelme, quoted in Cecelia Watson’s book Semicolon, described the semicolon as ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s body.’ In the standard definition a semicolon is a stop of greater emphasis and duration than that of a comma but less than that of a period. A bit vague, hazy, this, is it not? “Do not use semicolons” was Kurt Vonnegut’s position on the matter. ‘They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.’ Semicolons — who needed them? In time I came to learn, I did.”

Oprah picks Ta-Nehisi Coates’s first novel to kick off the latest iteration of her Book Club: “Coates called being picked for the book club ‘a tremendous, tremendous honor. You’re going into the company of people like Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead. This was, like, a huge, huge honor for me.’ This Book Club pick is Oprah’s first in partnership with Apple. ‘That was my goal, was to partner with Apple and have a wide bandwidth so we can create a community of readers around the world,’ she said.”

Jeremy Black’s hasty history of 18th-century England.

Essay of the Day:

In Tablet, Wesley Yang writes about four feminist law professors who are worried about the abuse of campus Title IX tribunals:

“I recently profiled Gersen and her colleagues in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education recounting their effort to defend the ‘most basic principles we teach’ against a movement that is working tirelessly to subvert them. It is significant that they speak from within that movement—the feminist movement—not just because this gives them a margin of credibility within a discourse that tends to assign standing on the basis of identity, but also because their intimate knowledge of the antecedent and ongoing struggles within feminism helps them to understand the intellectual roots of what is happening, and where those ideas are taking us.

“Though the four women find themselves opposed to visible tendencies within the movement, no one can doubt their standing within it. They are important theorists and practitioners who have made crucial contributions to historic feminist reforms. They represent a strain of longstanding internal critique that is native to the movement itself. Collectively, they have a stern message about the present course of the movement: As Halley, writing in the Harvard Law Review about a case in which a loud demand for punishment accompanied indifference to the guilt or innocence of the accused put it, ‘We have to pull back from this brink.’

“Each of the women I profiled arrived at their principled opposition to what they came to regard as the movement’s excesses through different paths. Nancy Gertner’s trajectory is particularly instructive. She was a member of a pioneering cohort of women at Harvard Law School, the second class to accept women in large numbers. She played an important role in securing a host of crucial reforms that made the law more protective of victims of domestic and sexual violence (such as removing the force requirement for rape) and became the third woman named to a federal judgeship.

“But after a lifetime in service of the feminist cause, she took on the case of a friend whose son she came to believe had been wrongly convicted of rape and won his acquittal on appeal. She became the target of the outrage culture of that time. When confronted by protesters at a symposium, she asked if it mattered to them that she believed the acquitted to be innocent. The answer she received made it clear that the guilt or innocence of the accused was a matter of indifference. What mattered was that she had sided with the enemy.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Summer in the Swiss Alps

Poem: Susannah Sheffer, “Mastery”

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