Brilliant Art, Free This Week

Maira Kalman is one of my favorite living artists, and also a friend (though she was a favorite artist before we became friends). Her children’s books are extraordinary (Next Stop, Grand Central is a great piece of kids’ non-fiction), as is her product design (her multi-lingual building blocks, not pictured, are great), though she is probably most famous for her “New Yorkistan” cover of The New Yorker, done in collaboration with beau and fellow artist Rick Meyerowitz.

For the past few months, Maira has also been drawing and writing a great blog, “The Principles of Uncertainty,” on TimesSelect, the subscription-only site of the N.Y. Times. Here’s the good news: this week, the Times is giving free access to TimesSelect. So go ahead and gorge on Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman and Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, but make sure to leave an hour or two, hopefully late at night when your mind is ready to travel a little further than usual, for the unique stylings of Maira Kalman.