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Emma Allen: In the gallery, (Dennis Quaid) whispered, “They don’t allow photography in here, do they?,” and took a selfie with some glowing yellow tubes. “It’s just really good light.”
"Our Bodies, Ourselves" / Rebecca Mead
__ The moral compass in Highsmith’s thrillers is always jittery, and passion repeatedly leads people to violence. Joan Schenkar, the author of the artful biography “The Talented Miss Highsmith” (2009), writes, “Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act.”
"Spooked" / Adam Gopnik
__ Indeed, Musser, though committed to empirical explanation, suggests that the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.” Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe. Musser sums it up in an enviable aphorism: “If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.
"The Book" Hisham Matar
__ What struck me, too, was the new silence that the passages left in their wake. They created, at least temporarily, among these political men, who seemed to me to function under the solid weight of certainty, a resonant moment of doubt. I felt excited, joyful, and melancholy all at once.
__ This is perhaps why that mysterious book, according to the logic of my memory, has fathered every other book I have read since. Even the great books that I return to, as one does to a favorite landscape, seem indebted, no matter how fugitively, to that unknown and unknowable book.
"Uninhabited" / Kevin Young
__ the true story of “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” a brutal and gory account of the U.S. bombing of Japan during the Second World War, which I had stumbled across and reported on, too. Running out of fuel after the bombing, the pilot author had crash-landed on yet another coast. I still recall the description of the narrator ejecting from the plane, and later finding his teeth in his hands.
"At Home in the Past" / Tessa Hadley
__ Then he tipped my desk toward me. The desk had a cubby attached to its underside, and I watched as the contents spilled from the cubby’s mouth: rectangular pink erasers, crayons, yellow pencils, wrinkled work sheets where dotted letters were filled in, a lime Dum Dum lollipop. But no poem. I stood before the rubble at my feet. Little moments of ice hurled themselves against the window as the boys and girls, my peers, stared, their faces as unconvinced as blank sheets of paper.
__ I had read books that weren’t books, and I had read them using everything but my eyes. From that invisible “reading,” I had pressed my world onto paper. As such, I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer. I have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me.
"Where Is Luckily" / Rivka Galchen
__ It’s mostly a clatter of carbohydrates and junk mail, but all those words were so haunted—remain so haunted—by a sense of well-being, meaning, and light. My heart still lifts when I see language that recalls the covers of my mother’s textbooks: Basic basic, Fortran.
"Citizen Khan" / Kathryn Schulz
"Confessional" / D. T. Max
__ “It was my introduction to the idea of indie film as trust-fund sport,” she says
__ Two weeks after arriving in Portland, in March, 2005, Shapiro concluded that she had grotesquely miscast herself. “It was just a fantasy to get me out of L.A.,” she says. “Being a folksinger is like talking to people who already agree with you.”
"Home Free" / Jennifer Gonnerman
__ There was a desk in each cell, welded to the wall, but it wasn’t large enough for Hamilton to spread out his legal papers, so he took his mattress off the metal bed frame, rolled it up, and sat on it, hunching over his bed, as he worked. When a guard slid a food tray into his cell, he ate beside his bed, like a lawyer eating at his desk.
"The Unseen" / Raffi Khatchadourian
Nick Paumgarten: (Fulk) said. “The sheen’s gone off the world, I find, at my age. I keep thinking of that Schopenhauer line about how when you’re young it’s like being halfway back in a theatre, looking at a beautiful backdrop. When you’re older, it’s like being two feet away.”
"The Shadow Doctors" / Ben Taub
__ Childbirth is “Call the Midwife” ’s version of a torture scene on FX, or a torrid three-way on Showtime, or a beheading on HBO. It’s the raw, relentless physical scenario that makes the viewer cringe; but, also, it’s what fans look forward to, because it’s cathartic to see—breaking a taboo, showing you something uncontrolled that you are not ordinarily allowed to observe. This quality is intensified by the remarkable way that these scenes are performed, as arias of physical extremes, with varying positions, and an unusual bluntness about how the female body operates.
Peter Schjeldahl on Stuart Davis:
__ Their musical rhythms and buttery textures appeal at a glance. If the works had a smell, it would be like that of a factory-fresh car—an echt American aura, from the country’s post-Second World War epoch of dazzling manufacture and soaring optimism.
"Our Bodies, Ourselves" / Rebecca Mead
- Doughty, who is thirty, said, “I want the office to look like me, but I don’t want it to look too Arty Death Hipster.” This was possibly a futile hope. She grabbed the skull and sat contemplating it; in her vintage wooden swivel chair, she looked like a noble in a memento-mori portrait.
- Today’s funeral director might stage a memorial service featuring the release of butterflies at the grave site, or with the deceased’s Harley parked ceremonially at the entrance to the chapel. In such instances, the skills of a funeral director can seem to fall somewhere between those of a nurse and a wedding planner.
- And she learned in what order corpses should be cremated when several must be processed in a single day. (Start with the heaviest decedent, when the cremation chamber is cold; if one waits until the chamber is hot, the body will burn too quickly, producing excessive smoke.)
- But she was disillusioned after working briefly at Forest Lawn, the vast L.A. funeral complex that inspired Evelyn Waugh to write “The Loved One,” his satirical 1948 novel.
__ The moral compass in Highsmith’s thrillers is always jittery, and passion repeatedly leads people to violence. Joan Schenkar, the author of the artful biography “The Talented Miss Highsmith” (2009), writes, “Pat thought about love the way she thought about murder: as an emotional urgency between two people, one of whom dies in the act.”
"Spooked" / Adam Gopnik
__ Indeed, Musser, though committed to empirical explanation, suggests that the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.” Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe. Musser sums it up in an enviable aphorism: “If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.
________________________________________________
"The Book" Hisham Matar
__ What struck me, too, was the new silence that the passages left in their wake. They created, at least temporarily, among these political men, who seemed to me to function under the solid weight of certainty, a resonant moment of doubt. I felt excited, joyful, and melancholy all at once.
__ This is perhaps why that mysterious book, according to the logic of my memory, has fathered every other book I have read since. Even the great books that I return to, as one does to a favorite landscape, seem indebted, no matter how fugitively, to that unknown and unknowable book.
"Uninhabited" / Kevin Young
__ the true story of “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” a brutal and gory account of the U.S. bombing of Japan during the Second World War, which I had stumbled across and reported on, too. Running out of fuel after the bombing, the pilot author had crash-landed on yet another coast. I still recall the description of the narrator ejecting from the plane, and later finding his teeth in his hands.
"At Home in the Past" / Tessa Hadley
- The book’s landscape is at once intimately known and unfamiliar; I seem to be stepping in the footprints I left when I was last here.
- Looking around with adult eyes, I suppose that I can see over the top of the wall of the secret garden: I can see the ideological underpinnings, understand the context, sniff out the falsities. And yet . . . submission is stronger. Or, at least, it is in the case of a book as richly, bravely, finely made as “The Secret Garden.” My doubting, critical self seems smaller, moving around inside the novel’s spaces, than the believing child who was here first. It’s the adult who feels dwarfed and tiny within the huge shape of the child’s experience.
- But I’m not sorry that I grew up on this rich fruitcake diet of feeling and moralizing. There are worse things. This is one of the miracles that fiction works: you can be a doubter and a believer in the same moment, in the same sentence.
__ Then he tipped my desk toward me. The desk had a cubby attached to its underside, and I watched as the contents spilled from the cubby’s mouth: rectangular pink erasers, crayons, yellow pencils, wrinkled work sheets where dotted letters were filled in, a lime Dum Dum lollipop. But no poem. I stood before the rubble at my feet. Little moments of ice hurled themselves against the window as the boys and girls, my peers, stared, their faces as unconvinced as blank sheets of paper.
__ I had read books that weren’t books, and I had read them using everything but my eyes. From that invisible “reading,” I had pressed my world onto paper. As such, I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer. I have plagiarized my life to give you the best of me.
"Where Is Luckily" / Rivka Galchen
__ It’s mostly a clatter of carbohydrates and junk mail, but all those words were so haunted—remain so haunted—by a sense of well-being, meaning, and light. My heart still lifts when I see language that recalls the covers of my mother’s textbooks: Basic basic, Fortran.
"Citizen Khan" / Kathryn Schulz
- Today, the town consists of three interstate exits’ worth of tract housing and fast food, surrounded by open-pit mines and pinned to the map by oil rigs.
- Among the Afghan venders, the worst of the tamale wars took place in Seattle, where the trade was dominated by a Khan with a mafioso reputation: mean, mendacious, scary as hell. Eventually, he was shot in the back, presumably by one of his fellow-peddlers, but, if the murder was meant to ease tensions in the tamale scene, it failed.
- han was roughly eighty—one of the few eighty-year-olds of whom it could be said that he still had most of his life ahead of him. In a picture taken earlier that year, he is holding the toddler Nazir on his lap, surrounded by his wife and other children. The oldest is barely ten, the next one eight, the next one seven. The others are too young to have begun salting away memories of their father, and they would never get to make new ones.
________________________________________
"Confessional" / D. T. Max
__ “It was my introduction to the idea of indie film as trust-fund sport,” she says
__ Two weeks after arriving in Portland, in March, 2005, Shapiro concluded that she had grotesquely miscast herself. “It was just a fantasy to get me out of L.A.,” she says. “Being a folksinger is like talking to people who already agree with you.”
"Home Free" / Jennifer Gonnerman
__ There was a desk in each cell, welded to the wall, but it wasn’t large enough for Hamilton to spread out his legal papers, so he took his mattress off the metal bed frame, rolled it up, and sat on it, hunching over his bed, as he worked. When a guard slid a food tray into his cell, he ate beside his bed, like a lawyer eating at his desk.
"The Unseen" / Raffi Khatchadourian
- Studying microbes inevitably causes a reordering of one’s perceptions: for more than two billion years, they were the only life on this planet, and they remain in many ways its dominant life form.
- in Namibia. “I noticed many of them wearing something made out of these beads,” he said. “I asked, Where do you get them? Oh, they say, there are people we know who make iron out of rocks. What? So I started digging, and here is what I learned: there’s a tribe—no road, no nothing, reachable by at least three days on horses. I will go one day. These guys found a way to make iron from iron ore, probably before the Europeans came... This is made by the same technology that your ancestors, my ancestors, everyone’s, were once using. It was made ten years ago, or twenty years ago, but it is like a time machine.”
- Not only do bacteria outnumber humans but they outweigh us, too, by a factor of a hundred million. Civilization is only a tweak to their landscape.
- If antibiotics are indeed weapons, then humans are latecomers to an aeons-old arms race, whose rules remain opaque to us. “It is absurd to believe that we could ever claim victory in a war against organisms that outnumber us by a factor of 1022, that outweigh us by a factor of 108, that have existed for a thousand times longer than our species, and that can undergo as many as five hundred thousand generations during one of our generations,” several scientists argued in a recent paper. The arsenals in question took bacteria billions of years to develop. “In contrast, antibiotics were not discovered by humans until the first half of the twentieth century.”
- The standard test is a kind of microbial murder mystery: an antibiotic is used again and again, until bacteria in the victim colonies mutate, developing resistance. The mutant DNA is then studied, and the changes that allow survival reveal how the victims were slaughtered.
- Certainly, joining with the Chinese, masters of scaling up, is a way to expand.
________________________________________
Nick Paumgarten: (Fulk) said. “The sheen’s gone off the world, I find, at my age. I keep thinking of that Schopenhauer line about how when you’re young it’s like being halfway back in a theatre, looking at a beautiful backdrop. When you’re older, it’s like being two feet away.”
"The Shadow Doctors" / Ben Taub
- “Sorry, didn’t see your message till now,” Nott typed under the table. “Is the neurology ok?” It was: a bullet had pierced the trachea and the esophagus, but it hadn’t damaged the spinal cord. Nott told the medical worker to insert a plastic tube into the bullet hole, to provide an even supply of air. Then, he instructed, sew up the digestive tract with a strong suture, and, “to buttress the repair,” partly detach one of the neck muscles and use it to cover the wound.
- Pro-regime medical staff routinely performed amputations for minor injuries, as a form of punishment. .. M.S.F. concluded that, for Syrians who opposed the President, the health-care system was “a weapon of persecution.”
- Nott taught the physicians to move flaps of muscle and skin to cover exposed bone and open wounds. One day, he saw a man whose hand had been completely flayed. In lieu of amputation, he sewed the hand to a flap in the man’s groin, which slowly sealed itself around the bones of the hand. After three weeks, Abu Waseem cut away the connective tissue, donating a large chunk of flesh to a hand that would otherwise have rotted.
- When a large bomb explodes, it destroys bodies in consecutive waves. The first is the blast wave, which spreads air particles at supersonic speeds. This can inflict internal damage on the organs, because, Nott said, “the air-tissue interface will bleed. So your lungs start to bleed inside. You can’t breathe. You can’t hear anything, because your eardrums are all blown out.” A fraction of a second later comes the blast wind, a negative pressure that catapults people into the air and slams them into whatever walls or objects are around. “The blast wind is so strong that in the wrong place it will actually blow off your leg,”
- Every day, patients arrived at the hospital so mangled and coated in debris that “you wouldn’t know whether you were looking at the front or the back, whether they were alive or dead,”
__ Childbirth is “Call the Midwife” ’s version of a torture scene on FX, or a torrid three-way on Showtime, or a beheading on HBO. It’s the raw, relentless physical scenario that makes the viewer cringe; but, also, it’s what fans look forward to, because it’s cathartic to see—breaking a taboo, showing you something uncontrolled that you are not ordinarily allowed to observe. This quality is intensified by the remarkable way that these scenes are performed, as arias of physical extremes, with varying positions, and an unusual bluntness about how the female body operates.
Peter Schjeldahl on Stuart Davis:
__ Their musical rhythms and buttery textures appeal at a glance. If the works had a smell, it would be like that of a factory-fresh car—an echt American aura, from the country’s post-Second World War epoch of dazzling manufacture and soaring optimism.
