Helping Syria through soup, Joseph Roth in hotels, Mona Lisa's grin, book covers in Weimar Era, Montreal's Chinatown: Cultural Digest August 26

• Some well-known chefs come together to publish a cookbook in order to aid Syrian refugees. A great indication that we can't all donate $20,000 nor can we hop a flight and work in a refugee camp on the border. But we can all do our part to remind the world that this crisis isn't over.
• On the occasion of Taschen's new book on book covers, Paris Review looks at a history of book covers and at the style and function of book covers during the Weimar Republic. Man, can Taschen do no wrong? I'd have 10 of their books if they didn't cost $150 a pop! I was in their shop in New York City once and could have spent $1,000. I didn't.
• Maisonneuve Magazine publishes a lovely little piece about Montreal's Chinatown. 
• We all recognize that self-satisfied smirk. Maybe not. New information about the intriguing smile of the Mona Lisa. 
• A new Joseph Roth collection (translated by one of the best translators in the world, honestly, Michael Hofman) comes out next month. This is a collection of Roth's journalism between the two World Wars as he battled alcoholism and attempted to re-establish his name and career after not being able to keep it together. What a brilliant mind and what an incredible writer.

The New Rijksmuseum

I saw this very interesting documentary last night, about the massive renovation of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

I knew very little about it so I went into it very vague about what the buzz was or even what the full scope of it was. I was almost immediately hooked.

It doesn't sound like it'd make that interesting a topic for a documentary: the ins and outs of city politics, planning officials, government officials, architects and museum staff as they go through a massive 10 year, 380 million Euro museum renovation. But the photography was so moving, the portraits of the individual staff members so compelling, the sense of the incredible bureaucracy of such a huge undertaking.

The love of the art is there, too: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Japanese guard tower statues, Buddhas, Dutch Masters. You get a sense of Dutch society, too, the way people argue and negotiate work relationships, the varying personalities, the changes in staff (the Director quits halfway through the documentary and a new one is taken on, even though one of the other staff members hopes on camera that he'll be selected as the new Director).

Architecture takes front and centre stage and it really makes you see the complexity of creating public space for a specific public while still making other stakeholders happy (the head of the bicyclists' union is not portrayed particularly positively and this is a major them of the film, the battle against bicyclists).

It's a great film and plays the rest of the week at Cinema du Parc. By the end, when the museum opens anew, I almost teared up at the long effort and work that took place for all those years, getting the museum completed.