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fiefoe"Midtown Shuffle" / Reeves Wiedeman
__ The Palace has had its share of authoritarian owners—the Sultan of Brunei, Leona Helmsley—but is now run by a South Korean conglomerate. ... The Americans’ move set in motion a game of musical suites. The Indians, who typically stay at the Palace, switched to the Waldorf— perhaps in a show of intracontinental solidarity. Every Chinese leader since 1974 has stayed in the Waldorf, and Vladimir Putin was there, too.
"Naked Cities" / Adam Gopnik
__ The reason that perceptions of cities switch so radically is twofold. Cities are the contradictions of capitalism, spelled out in crowds. They are engines of prosperity and inequality in equal measure, and when the inequality tips poor they look unsavable; when it tips rich, they look unjust. And then cities enfold a subtler contradiction—they shine by bringing like-minded people in from the hinterland (gays, geeks, Jews, artists, bohemians), but they thrive by asking unlike-minded people to live together in the enveloping metropolis.
http://blog.thehenryford.org/2013/12/christmas-fantasy-at-the-ford-rotunda/
"One Small Step" / D. T. Max
__ Olfactory ensheathing cells have shown surprising promise in healing spinal-cord injuries in a field dominated by far better-funded efforts, principally stem-cell transplants and experiments to stimulate nerve growth through drugs. So far, these two methods have not worked as well as hoped—stem cells turn out to be difficult to manipulate, and the microenvironment of spinal-cord fluid is extremely complicated. Ensheathing cells have become a surprise contender.
__ But, because it was unlikely that an ethics board would allow a doctor to operate on the brain of a human for uncertain gain when a simpler and less risky procedure on the sinuses was possible, surgeons in the West had used only ensheathing cells from the nasal cavity. The doctors felt a strange form of luck, then, when they discovered that Fidyka had sinusitis so severe that he had undergone an operation to remove part of his sinuses. Ever since, his sense of smell had been diminished. Tabakow and Raisman concluded that there would be few usable olfactory ensheathing cells left in Fidyka’s nose. This posed an opportunity.
"Seeing and Believing" / Peter Schjeldahl
"Air Head" / Nathan Heller
__ The start of a flight heralds a game afoot. The rush is skittish and improbable. A freighted mass of metal rattling down the runway gains a sudden burst of speed and, in a small, miraculous gasp, loses its weight, rises, and soars, enacting careful turns and radio coördinations that accrue toward effortlessness. On the ground, on landing, it’s again a metal hulk; the metamorphosis reverses itself.
__ To land somewhere unfamiliar is to force yourself into alertness, to redraw whatever maps you have, to set the stage for creativity more than mere pattern-matching productivity.
__ “Look at that,” the driver said. The road had forked again. To our right, the hills fell away, revealing a full moon. The Mediterranean gaped beneath it, wide and textured like the skin of an old person’s cheek. I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream. A breeze came up, jasmine and silk trees, and we followed it down toward the water. Every switchback offered a new view.
"Cover Story" / Elif Batuman
__ Such happiness is “painfully out of reach for a bachelor,” even a rich one with servants; it really depends on a wife who can cook and entertain, who can turn a house into a home. <> This is the cost of bourgeois happiness, in Houellebecq’s Islamic utopia: the independence of women. It’s fascinating to see how Houellebecq rises to the challenge of making female domestic enslavement seem palatable in the novel,
__ He portrays Islam not as a depersonalized creeping menace, or as an ideological last resort to which those disenfranchised by the West may be “vulnerable,” but as a system of beliefs that is enormously appealing to many people, many of whom have other options. It’s the same realization I reached in Urfa. Nobody has everything; everyone is trading certain things for others.
"Forced Out" / Matthew Desmond
__ If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
Patricia Marx: Have you ever tried to find a comfortable position in bed and concluded it was impossible unless you got rid of your shoulder?
"The Bouvier Affair" / Sam Knight
__ The relationship between art dealer and collector is particular and charged. The dealer is mentor and salesman. He informs his client’s desires while subjecting himself to them at the same time. The collector has money, but he is also vulnerable. Relationships start, prosper, and fail for any number of reasons. It is not always obvious where power lies. Over time, each one can convince himself that he has created the other.
__ “When you sell to a collection,” he said, “it is like you place your child in a nursery.” Blondeau told me
"Not-Guilty Pleasure" / Emily Nussbaum
__ Identity can function as a game of rock-paper-scissors. In Judge Ito’s court, two decades ago, race beat gender.
__ In Darden’s failures, “American Crime Story” finds not incompetence but a buried tragedy, about the confines of identity and the isolation of being forced to pick a team, then stick with it, at any cost.
"Unsuitable Boys" / James Wood
__ The novel contains no direct dialogue, only reported speech; scenes are remembered by the narrator, not invented by an omniscient author, which means that the writing doesn’t have to involve itself in those feats of startup mimesis that form the grammar, and gamble, of most novels. In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension; so consummate is the pacing and control, it seems as if he understands this section to be a single long sentence.
__ Or this piece of perfected wisdom: “One of the surprises of growing up was finding out what things had been about.”
__ The Palace has had its share of authoritarian owners—the Sultan of Brunei, Leona Helmsley—but is now run by a South Korean conglomerate. ... The Americans’ move set in motion a game of musical suites. The Indians, who typically stay at the Palace, switched to the Waldorf— perhaps in a show of intracontinental solidarity. Every Chinese leader since 1974 has stayed in the Waldorf, and Vladimir Putin was there, too.
"Naked Cities" / Adam Gopnik
__ The reason that perceptions of cities switch so radically is twofold. Cities are the contradictions of capitalism, spelled out in crowds. They are engines of prosperity and inequality in equal measure, and when the inequality tips poor they look unsavable; when it tips rich, they look unjust. And then cities enfold a subtler contradiction—they shine by bringing like-minded people in from the hinterland (gays, geeks, Jews, artists, bohemians), but they thrive by asking unlike-minded people to live together in the enveloping metropolis.
http://blog.thehenryford.org/2013/12/christmas-fantasy-at-the-ford-rotunda/
___________________________________________
"One Small Step" / D. T. Max
__ Olfactory ensheathing cells have shown surprising promise in healing spinal-cord injuries in a field dominated by far better-funded efforts, principally stem-cell transplants and experiments to stimulate nerve growth through drugs. So far, these two methods have not worked as well as hoped—stem cells turn out to be difficult to manipulate, and the microenvironment of spinal-cord fluid is extremely complicated. Ensheathing cells have become a surprise contender.
__ But, because it was unlikely that an ethics board would allow a doctor to operate on the brain of a human for uncertain gain when a simpler and less risky procedure on the sinuses was possible, surgeons in the West had used only ensheathing cells from the nasal cavity. The doctors felt a strange form of luck, then, when they discovered that Fidyka had sinusitis so severe that he had undergone an operation to remove part of his sinuses. Ever since, his sense of smell had been diminished. Tabakow and Raisman concluded that there would be few usable olfactory ensheathing cells left in Fidyka’s nose. This posed an opportunity.
"Seeing and Believing" / Peter Schjeldahl
- When we call a thing “unbelievable,” we’re expressing a belief that it’s true. Similarly, we employ “incredible” to confer credibility, and “fantastic” to admit facts. We thereby put happy faces on mortifications of our common sense.
- It’s a delicious read, spiced by anecdotal encounters with the author’s fellow-obsessives in a field as deep as it is narrow.
- Thus ventriloquizing a reader’s skepticism, Jay justifiably gloats at having occasioned, yet again, the “unbelievable”—a solid though wildly implausible verity, like the inexplicable reappearance of an ace of spades.
- The other is a dramatizing of the drive for self-fulfillment that artists share with prodigious individuals in any field. There’s a touch, beyond the incredible, of sublimity in Buchinger’s compensations for an unpromising physique. Take it with you when viewing any of the museum’s treasures, none a random deal from the deck of human possibilities.
______________________________________________
"Air Head" / Nathan Heller
__ The start of a flight heralds a game afoot. The rush is skittish and improbable. A freighted mass of metal rattling down the runway gains a sudden burst of speed and, in a small, miraculous gasp, loses its weight, rises, and soars, enacting careful turns and radio coördinations that accrue toward effortlessness. On the ground, on landing, it’s again a metal hulk; the metamorphosis reverses itself.
__ To land somewhere unfamiliar is to force yourself into alertness, to redraw whatever maps you have, to set the stage for creativity more than mere pattern-matching productivity.
__ “Look at that,” the driver said. The road had forked again. To our right, the hills fell away, revealing a full moon. The Mediterranean gaped beneath it, wide and textured like the skin of an old person’s cheek. I rolled the window down, certain that I was watching something people were not supposed to see: the world undressing itself, changing color, wiping off its makeup with a moonlight-hued layer of cream. A breeze came up, jasmine and silk trees, and we followed it down toward the water. Every switchback offered a new view.
______________________________________________
"Cover Story" / Elif Batuman
__ Such happiness is “painfully out of reach for a bachelor,” even a rich one with servants; it really depends on a wife who can cook and entertain, who can turn a house into a home. <> This is the cost of bourgeois happiness, in Houellebecq’s Islamic utopia: the independence of women. It’s fascinating to see how Houellebecq rises to the challenge of making female domestic enslavement seem palatable in the novel,
__ He portrays Islam not as a depersonalized creeping menace, or as an ideological last resort to which those disenfranchised by the West may be “vulnerable,” but as a system of beliefs that is enormously appealing to many people, many of whom have other options. It’s the same realization I reached in Urfa. Nobody has everything; everyone is trading certain things for others.
"Forced Out" / Matthew Desmond
__ If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.
Patricia Marx: Have you ever tried to find a comfortable position in bed and concluded it was impossible unless you got rid of your shoulder?
"The Bouvier Affair" / Sam Knight
__ The relationship between art dealer and collector is particular and charged. The dealer is mentor and salesman. He informs his client’s desires while subjecting himself to them at the same time. The collector has money, but he is also vulnerable. Relationships start, prosper, and fail for any number of reasons. It is not always obvious where power lies. Over time, each one can convince himself that he has created the other.
__ “When you sell to a collection,” he said, “it is like you place your child in a nursery.” Blondeau told me
"Not-Guilty Pleasure" / Emily Nussbaum
__ Identity can function as a game of rock-paper-scissors. In Judge Ito’s court, two decades ago, race beat gender.
__ In Darden’s failures, “American Crime Story” finds not incompetence but a buried tragedy, about the confines of identity and the isolation of being forced to pick a team, then stick with it, at any cost.
"Unsuitable Boys" / James Wood
__ The novel contains no direct dialogue, only reported speech; scenes are remembered by the narrator, not invented by an omniscient author, which means that the writing doesn’t have to involve itself in those feats of startup mimesis that form the grammar, and gamble, of most novels. In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension; so consummate is the pacing and control, it seems as if he understands this section to be a single long sentence.
__ Or this piece of perfected wisdom: “One of the surprises of growing up was finding out what things had been about.”
