Life

WHEN it comes to reading digital books, tablets are all the rage. But there’s a lot to like about simple e-readers, which over the past year have become both a lot cheaper and a lot less clunky. Tablets usually have full color screens, include Web browsers and e-mail programs, and can run a wide range of applications; by contrast, e-readers typically have black-and-white screens and are designed to be used primarily for reading e-books. Among the more impressive of the new e-readers is the Kindle Touch, from Amazon.com Inc., which has only two buttons: one for “home” and the other for power.

DIANA ROSS has never won a Grammy.

Though nominated 12 times for her work with the Supremes and for her solo efforts, the singer behind pop classis such as “Baby Love” and “Upside Down” has never taken home the award.

Last Saturday, she was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy along with Gil Scott-Heron, the Allman Brothers, Glen Campbell, George Jones, Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Memphis Horns, at an invitation-only ceremony the night before the Grammy telecast. Given her stature and the unmatched breadth of her work, it seems a wan consolation prize.

THE effusive colors on the canvases of Nunilon Bancaso’s works are deceiving. The use of what seems like a limitless fondness for all the possible palettes in the world appears to tell us of an artistry that is facile, if not charming.

A modifier that stresses how a piece of art can charm is, however, dangerous; the description can diminish the power of whatever message the artist wants to convey. It is not that art should always fit itself with the armor of gravitas but the works of Bancaso have all that—a majesty and a hugeness that grab your way of seeing onto a way of believing.