Adam Levy has always called Johannesburg home. He grew up in Melrose, a whites-only suburb in northern Johannesburg. Today, the 33-year-old real estate developer lives in the city’s historic district of Braamfontein, a budding cultural hub where the University of the Witwatersrand is located. He converted a 10-story 1950s office building into seven apartments and lives in the penthouse which looks out on Nelson Mandela Bridge.

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NYT: Bringing a Taste of New York to Johannesburg

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NYT Slideshow: A City View, Johannesburg

Chinua Achebe is a professor at Brown University and the author “Things Fall Apart.” Published in 1958, it is the bestselling novel ever written by an African. Achebe is nearly 80 now and has been in exile from Nigeria for almost two decades, but when posed a few questions he makes clear he still has plenty of wit and wisdom to share.

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NYT: Questions for Chinua Achebe, Out of Africa

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Press Release: Famed African Writer Chinua Achebe Joins the Brown Faculty
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Dominique Browning served as editor-in-chief of House & Garden for 12 years. Work was her life. When Condé Nast closed the shelter publication in 1997, she hoarded the magazine’s office supplies and wasn’t sure what to do next. “For years, I had a profound dread of unemployment that went way beyond worrying about how to pay the bills,” she writes in The New York Times Magazine. “Without work, who was I? I do not mean that my title defined me. What did define me was the simple act of working. The loss of my job triggered a cascade of self-doubt and depression. I felt like a failure. Not that the magazine had failed — that I had.”

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NYT Magazine: Losing It

Major New York City museums — including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim and The Morgan Library — have recently hired curators in the thirties to head key departments. The young talent is expected to help the cultural institutions understand how to attract the next generation of museum patrons. The New York Times reports, it’s “a group plugged in to all areas of museum life. They don’t simply organize exhibitions, they also have a hand in fund-raising and public relations, catalog production and installation. ”

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NYT: The New Guard of Curators Steps Up

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NYT: Young Curators Speak

Designer Phillip Lim at the Opening Reception of STAGES at Deitch Projects

Designer Phillip Lim‘s clothing has a feminine, downtown aesthetic with a nod to whimsy. His flagship store and the loft where he makes his home are both in Soho. There, his one-bedroom is filled with art and books. He has orchids delivered every two weeks and the rug at the foot of his bed is a giant crocodile skin.

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NYT: Domains/Phillip Lim: House of Style

Incredibly, there are many more details to learn about John Edwards’s extramarital activities while he campaigned for president. The Democratic golden boy turns out to be more egotistic than earlier reports indicated. Oh, and apparently Elizabeth Edwards, his wife, isn’t quite as angelic as her public persona, either. An excerpt in New York magazine from a new book about the 2008 race for the White House, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Hellemann and Mark Halperin, provides new details. The report includes what the campaign staff knew when, what they tried to do stop the affair that produced Edwards’s “love child” and, while battling cancer, his wife’s erratic response to the lies and revelations.

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New York: Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster

Harlem was white before it was black. The Harlem Renaissance, the black arts and literary movement the flourished in the 1920s, sealed its identity and the population numbers since have confirmed the community’s African American roots. But over the past decade, uptown has experienced a demographic shift. As real estate prices throughout the city soared, Harlem’s architectural gems and modern new condo buildings attracted many New Yorkers who previously wouldn’t have considered the neighborhood. Determining Harlem’s boundaries and whether increases in the white vs. the Latino and Asian populations have different influences on the culture, make assessing the blackness of today’s Harlem an inexact science. A New York Times report says Harlem is no longer majority black.

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NYT: No Longer Majority Black, Harlem is in Transition

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The Root: Is Harlem No Longer Black? It Depends on Where You Set the Boundaries