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fiefoe"In Defense of the True ’Cue" / Calvin Trillin
__ When a newspaper reporter put that proposition before Jerry Bledsoe, a writer who takes the Piedmont side during exchanges of volleys between the camps, he said, “I’m totally opposed. The feud is as good as the food.”
"A New Leaf" / Dana Goodyear
__ Before he was a full-time farmer, he drove a lumber truck and sold pieces of the Coney Island boardwalk stencilled with obscure words like “petrichor” (the smell of rain on dry earth) and “limerence” (tingly infatuation) to tourists in Union Square.
__ Instead of rigid cell walls like those found in land plants, seaweeds’ cell walls are rich in sugars to help them bend rather than break in swells. These sugars—known as alginates, carrageenans, and agars—thicken, bind, and emulsify toothpaste, shampoo, skin cream, and countless industrial foods, including most ice cream.
__ Diving in the kelp is a biologist’s dream. “You can be sixty feet down, looking up at these giant columns of kelp spreading out on the surface, and these golden shafts of light, like light through a stained-glass window,” he said. “There are hundreds of species around you. It’s like flying through the forest.”
"Accounting for Taste" / Nicola Twilley
__ The experiment was the first to successfully demonstrate that food could be made to taste different through the addition or subtraction of sound alone.
__ A graduate student had spent the morning in the soundproof booth, recording the slightly different whoosh that each can made as she pulled the tab and popped it open. The cans had been supplied by Crown Holdings, an American company that produces one of every five beverage cans in the world; the recordings are to be used in a series of pre-trials to determine whether altering the particular pitch and tonal quality of a can’s opening hiss can make its contents seem fizzier or flatter, warmer or colder.
"Freedom from Fries" / Michael Specter
__ Few federal incentives exist for farmers to grow a more varied selection of vegetables or to motivate consumers to eat them. And at least half of our calories come from food that is subsidized by the government, a figure that has held steady for years.
"Who’s to Judge?" / Lauren Collins
__ Guzmán had the dreamy, doomed look of a duellist (or, as more than one woman in the audience pointed out, of Johnny Depp).
__ The 50 Best, which is as much about a sort of competitive hedonism as it is about connoisseurship, is the restaurant guide its era demands—edible clickbait, a Baedeker’s for bucket-listers.
Schubert Piano Sonata No 21 in B flat, D960 Andras Schiff
"Life Is Rescues" / Nick Paumgarten
__ As with any human endeavor, there are hierarchies and assertions of status. “The mountaineers think they’re the center of the universe,” one rescuer said. One of those mountaineers smiled when I told him this and said that when he or his cohort get into trouble they just call each other for help, rather than SAR. “Otherwise, you get a hundred people showing up, with all of their cars and trucks.”
__ Landsbjörg is in some respects just a fireworks mafia, to the same extent that the Girl Scouts is a network for the distribution of Thin Mints.
Trumbo expressed himself in natural one-liners (“What the imagination can’t conjure, reality delivers with a shrug,” he notes of his prison experience.
"Uneasy Rider" / Alexandra Schwartz
__ Friends are susceptible to the subtle struggle for appreciation and control just as much as lovers are;
"Big Ideas" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ Stella made a permanent difference in art history. He is extraordinarily intelligent and extravagantly skilled. But his example is cautionary. Even groundbreaking ideas have life spans, and Stella’s belief in inherent values of abstract art has long since ceased to be shared by younger artists. His ambition rolls on, unalloyed with self-questioning or humor. The most effective installations of Stella’s later works that I have seen are in corporate settings, where they can seem to function as symbols of team spirit. Rather than savoring his work now, you endorse it, or not.
"Opera on Location" / Alex Ross
__ “Well, it will be electronic, and it will contain the therapeutic road map of every trick that cancer cells have—how they form, all the ways you can defeat them, and all the ways they can escape and defeat a treatment. And when we have that we win. Because every cancer cell starts naïve. It doesn’t know what we have waiting in the freezer for it. Infectious diseases are a different story; they share their knowledge as they spread. They learn from us as they move from person to person. But every person’s cancer starts naïve. And this is why we will beat it.”
"The Invisible Library" / John Seabrook
__ And extravagant devotion may sometimes be the expression of vicarious grandiosity.
__ “For the more mortal among us,” Schiff observes, “there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.”
__ When a newspaper reporter put that proposition before Jerry Bledsoe, a writer who takes the Piedmont side during exchanges of volleys between the camps, he said, “I’m totally opposed. The feud is as good as the food.”
"A New Leaf" / Dana Goodyear
__ Before he was a full-time farmer, he drove a lumber truck and sold pieces of the Coney Island boardwalk stencilled with obscure words like “petrichor” (the smell of rain on dry earth) and “limerence” (tingly infatuation) to tourists in Union Square.
__ Instead of rigid cell walls like those found in land plants, seaweeds’ cell walls are rich in sugars to help them bend rather than break in swells. These sugars—known as alginates, carrageenans, and agars—thicken, bind, and emulsify toothpaste, shampoo, skin cream, and countless industrial foods, including most ice cream.
__ Diving in the kelp is a biologist’s dream. “You can be sixty feet down, looking up at these giant columns of kelp spreading out on the surface, and these golden shafts of light, like light through a stained-glass window,” he said. “There are hundreds of species around you. It’s like flying through the forest.”
"Accounting for Taste" / Nicola Twilley
__ The experiment was the first to successfully demonstrate that food could be made to taste different through the addition or subtraction of sound alone.
__ A graduate student had spent the morning in the soundproof booth, recording the slightly different whoosh that each can made as she pulled the tab and popped it open. The cans had been supplied by Crown Holdings, an American company that produces one of every five beverage cans in the world; the recordings are to be used in a series of pre-trials to determine whether altering the particular pitch and tonal quality of a can’s opening hiss can make its contents seem fizzier or flatter, warmer or colder.
"Freedom from Fries" / Michael Specter
__ Few federal incentives exist for farmers to grow a more varied selection of vegetables or to motivate consumers to eat them. And at least half of our calories come from food that is subsidized by the government, a figure that has held steady for years.
"Who’s to Judge?" / Lauren Collins
__ Guzmán had the dreamy, doomed look of a duellist (or, as more than one woman in the audience pointed out, of Johnny Depp).
__ The 50 Best, which is as much about a sort of competitive hedonism as it is about connoisseurship, is the restaurant guide its era demands—edible clickbait, a Baedeker’s for bucket-listers.
Schubert Piano Sonata No 21 in B flat, D960 Andras Schiff
__________________________________
"Life Is Rescues" / Nick Paumgarten
__ As with any human endeavor, there are hierarchies and assertions of status. “The mountaineers think they’re the center of the universe,” one rescuer said. One of those mountaineers smiled when I told him this and said that when he or his cohort get into trouble they just call each other for help, rather than SAR. “Otherwise, you get a hundred people showing up, with all of their cars and trucks.”
__ Landsbjörg is in some respects just a fireworks mafia, to the same extent that the Girl Scouts is a network for the distribution of Thin Mints.
Trumbo expressed himself in natural one-liners (“What the imagination can’t conjure, reality delivers with a shrug,” he notes of his prison experience.
"Uneasy Rider" / Alexandra Schwartz
__ Friends are susceptible to the subtle struggle for appreciation and control just as much as lovers are;
"Big Ideas" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ Stella made a permanent difference in art history. He is extraordinarily intelligent and extravagantly skilled. But his example is cautionary. Even groundbreaking ideas have life spans, and Stella’s belief in inherent values of abstract art has long since ceased to be shared by younger artists. His ambition rolls on, unalloyed with self-questioning or humor. The most effective installations of Stella’s later works that I have seen are in corporate settings, where they can seem to function as symbols of team spirit. Rather than savoring his work now, you endorse it, or not.
___________________________________
"Opera on Location" / Alex Ross
- “An opera with a nonsequential plot that depends on cars arriving on time in L.A.? We’ve created a monster, but it’s alive.” He closed his eyes and gave an antic laugh.
- If the Dodgers had reached the World Series, they would have played at home on Halloween, the day that “Hopscotch” opened, and the opera’s routes would have been mired in traffic.
- Barton stood in the back of the vehicle, singing into the onrushing air, “How do I start over again?” A man fishing on the river whistled as we sped by. The scene is brief but intense, like the kind of dream one has after hitting the snooze button.
- The metaphor captures the brazenness of “Hopscotch”: its way of impinging on daily life in an organized citywide assault. ... Levy left the party early in order to drive to Long Beach, where he had a gig playing in the pit band for a production of “My Fair Lady.” The next day, he was back on his tower, an assassin of the ordinary.
__ “Well, it will be electronic, and it will contain the therapeutic road map of every trick that cancer cells have—how they form, all the ways you can defeat them, and all the ways they can escape and defeat a treatment. And when we have that we win. Because every cancer cell starts naïve. It doesn’t know what we have waiting in the freezer for it. Infectious diseases are a different story; they share their knowledge as they spread. They learn from us as they move from person to person. But every person’s cancer starts naïve. And this is why we will beat it.”
"The Invisible Library" / John Seabrook
- by 1800, the Herculaneum scrolls had become instruments of diplomatic and political power. In 1802, Ferdinand, the Bourbon king of Naples and Sicily, “gave” six of the scrolls to Napoleon, who was threatening to invade Naples.
- Epicurus influenced the first-century-B.C. Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who wrote “On the Nature of Things,” the epic poem that was rediscovered in a monastic library in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini, a find that Stephen Greenblatt, in his 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” credits as being a founding document of the Renaissance.
- Delattre has been trying to figure out the correct order of the pieces, read them, and publish an edition before he dies, a goal that he says is impossible, because the project “takes an infinite time. Our human scale is not the scale of the scrolls.” He is far enough along in the book to be sure that it is yet another work by Philodemus: “On Slander.”
- Because the beam is so small, millions of exposures are needed to get a 3-D picture of a scroll. Although the letters are only two or three millimetres high, hundreds of scans are required to get enough information to make out a single letter.
__ And extravagant devotion may sometimes be the expression of vicarious grandiosity.
__ “For the more mortal among us,” Schiff observes, “there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.”
