Word: mintings
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...coin. It's weighty stuff, nearly twice the heft of an American quarter, and six times as valuable. It's got a gilt-colored exterior and a serene-looking Queen Elizabeth II on the face. It's a thick coin, about three stacked quarters high, and the British Royal Mint has dressed up the edge with fancy-looking Latin inscriptions ("Spend me wisely," they seem to say). The pound feels like real money. It feels great...
Americans are about to get their own version of this metallic frisson. A smooth-edged, golden-hued $1 coin is working its way into circulation. By year's end the U.S. Mint hopes to have about 1 billion of the dollar coins bouncing in our pockets. And unlike the Susan B. Anthony dollar of the 1980s--a wimpy, woefully misshapen quarter--the new Sacagawea dollar has the gravity and import of the pound. It looks and feels like something you might see in an Old West saloon, perfect for a nation that worships its frontier past. (It's no accident...
...examples of Watts's subversion of three consumerist and capitalist systems: the bureaucratic system in his attempt to patent the word "pop" and his collection of all "pop"-related patents, the postal system in his endeavor to circulate his own stamps and the monetary system in his attempt to mint his own mock currency. Hastily labeled as subtle critiques of the privileged class's control of aesthetic standards, these pieces are significant for their wit, whimsy, and delightful irreverence...
Thinking of a career in public relations? Well, you might be tempted by the prospect of making a mint advising Colorado's Jefferson County on how best not to anger the citizens they are supposed to serve...
...idea of a long novel about horses and horse racing has all the appeal of an afternoon at a seedy OTB outpost, read on. For Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven (Knopf; 561 pages; $26) turns out to go down quite easily--more like a pitcher of mint juleps at the Kentucky Derby. Smiley, who has already given us an epic about Greenland, an academic comedy set in the Midwest and historical fiction about abolition, has as great a range and as much intellectual curiosity as any novelist writing today. In her latest book, she takes on a fresh topic...