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fiefoe"The Teen Whisperer" / Margaret Talbot
__ When Green told the crowd that, though he was proud of the movie, it wasn’t his movie, someone shouted, “But it’s your plot, John!”— which marked the first time I’d ever heard heckling about the nature of authorship.
__ Indian Springs offered the kind of verdant, self-contained setting where one could have a preëmptively nostalgic coming-of-age. You could almost feel yourself missing it while you were still there. Green captures this delicious melancholy in “Looking for Alaska,”
"Ghosts in the Stacks" / Christine Smallwood
__ (It is filled with marvellous details and set pieces, like the one in which John Ruskin, reared on hairless sculptures of female nudes, defers consummating his marriage to Effie Gray for so long that she sues for divorce.)
__ The alphabet is great, but there is nothing quite as arbitrary as one’s own past choices.
"The Siege of Miami" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ It was hard to tell how seriously he took any of these ideas; even if one of them turned out to be workable, the effort required to, in effect, caulk the entire island seemed staggering.
"Through the Looking Glass" / Carolyn Kormann
__ Leeuwenhoek had an intensive routine of oral prophylaxis, which involved rubbing salt on his teeth each morning and buffing his molars with a cloth after meals. Nevertheless, he wrote, the plaque lay “thick as if ’twere batter.” He scraped some off, mixed it with rainwater, deposited a droplet on one of his microscopes, and held it up to the light. The sample was teeming with “many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.”
__ He calls it the Foldscope, and it comes in a kit. (Mine arrived in a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope.) The paper is printed with botanical illustrations and perforated with several shapes, which can be punched out and, with a series of origami-style folds, woven together into a single unit. The end result is about the size of a bookmark. The lens—a speck of plastic, situated in the center—provides a hundred and forty times magnification. The kit includes a second lens, of higher magnification, and a set of stick-on magnets, which can be used to attach the Foldscope to a smartphone, allowing for easy recording of a sample with the phone’s camera.
__ His entries included a replica of the Exxon Valdez, the oil tanker that ran aground off the Alaskan coast in 1989, and an anatomically accurate rabbit skeleton made from the stinking corpses of two rabbits. (“They have about as many bones as a human,” Prakash said.)
"Negotiating the Whirlwind" / David Remnick
__ The farrago of competing national interests, the legacies of historical blunders, the fantastical cast of characters, the sheer bloodlust, the prospect of regional if not global conflict—all conspire to make Kerry’s task in Syria nearly impossible.
__ We arrived late in the evening, which was perfect, because Saudi officials, like moonflowers, bloom at night.
Emily Nussbaum: It all seems like a replay of the same nightmare scenario: say yes to anything and you’ve signed away your right to ever say no. “I want everything to be my fault,” one female character says, on “Jessica Jones.” “Means I have some control.”
"Shades of White" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ There was, as there remains, something monkish about his submission to austere forms and procedures. For a while, in the early sixties, he flirted with color and with mildly decorative effects, such as layering whites atop reds and blues. It was as if he were straining against a principled compunction and toward an indulgence in the hedonistic rewards of painting.
__ I well remember the pleasant shock of his show at Virginia Dwan’s gallery, on Fifty-seventh Street, in 1971, of identically big, square, white paintings on sheets of vinyl, which were held to the wall by paint that ran over their edges. (Tiny blank patches showed, where pieces of masking tape had secured the vinyl while the paint dried.) It was like entering a luminous fog bank in which nothing—except everything—was palpable. Under its spell, you could deem even the most astringent works of other artists fatally fussy.
___________________________________
"Clean Plate Club" / Bill Buford
__ The cooks who had gathered on the corner were Barber’s staff and would be not only making the lunch but also serving it. (“They’re the only people who could possibly explain the dishes,” he said.)
__ He smeared a green dressing on the side of a wooden bowl. “This is the landing pad. You pile the salad on top.” “Landing pad,” in kitchen vernacular, means something like an anchor: it keeps food from sliding off a serving dish.
Alec Wilkinson:
__ “I’m an aggregator,” Ryan said. “It’s a useful talent, but sometimes I worry that you haven’t put deep thought into what you’re doing in the world,” Pattengale said. “Just because I include attributions doesn’t mean I don’t know,” Ryan said.
"The Accused" / Jiayang Fan
__ In a sense, Abacus’s customers—with their limited financial horizons and their reliance on networks of trust—were living the thrifty lives that small-town Americans once prided themselves on. Whereas the financial crisis was caused by mainstream American banks making loans that they knew were likely to result in default, the low rate of default at Abacus showed the bank to be uncannily astute in reckoning the financial capacity of its borrowers. As an op-ed in a Chinatown newspaper put it, “If every bank behaved like Abacus, the financial crisis wouldn’t have occurred.”
__ However, unspoken in many discussions about the Chinatown economy is the issue of tax evasion.
"The Populist Prophet" / Margaret Talbot
__ (Sanders) had devised his own equivalent of Sterno, which his friends dubbed Berno. “It was a roll of toilet paper soaked in lighter fluid inside a coffee can,” Rader said. “He’d cook over that.”
"The Network Man" / Nicholas Lemann
__ Hoffman used game logic to solve the problem: “The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.” He went to the chief bully, and said that if he continued to hassle him, “ ‘I will break everything you own.’ He stopped.”
Louis Menand:
That’s how Donald Trump got his start. In 1974, when he was twenty-eight and had never built a thing in Manhattan, he set out to acquire property owned by the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. One of those pieces was the Grand Commodore Hotel, on Forty-second Street, next to Grand Central. According to Trump’s account, in his first book, “The Art of the Deal” (required reading for those of us preparing for a Trump Presidency), he got the city to agree to let him pay taxes on the property based on its assessed value in 1975. Trump renovated the hotel, and, in 1980, it reopened as the Grand Hyatt. The tax abatement was good for forty years, and is estimated to have been worth sixty million dollars in its first decade.
"Holding the T" / Tad Friend
__ I would wake at 5 a.m., the hour of remorse, pinned by cares: overdue tax payments; overdue museum-permission forms; an overdue article; Roth I.R.A. regret.
__ Since then, though, some stealth riptide had carried me away from myself. I’d become the guy who petered out. The gap between who I thought I was and the iPad double everyone else saw was the precise measure of my disarray.
__ These friendships are usually squash-specific: we play, postmortem a bit, then part. But they’re stamped by the pleasure of jamming together, of collaborating on a jubilant rag of hissing strings, percussive splats, sneaker squeaks, and winded grunts. When the game soars like that, the showers are an Olympic platform. A squash-playing friend of mine, when asked to name his favorite body of water, wrote, “The showers at the Racquet Club.”
"Little Henry, Happy at Last" / Adam Gopnik
__ When Green told the crowd that, though he was proud of the movie, it wasn’t his movie, someone shouted, “But it’s your plot, John!”— which marked the first time I’d ever heard heckling about the nature of authorship.
__ Indian Springs offered the kind of verdant, self-contained setting where one could have a preëmptively nostalgic coming-of-age. You could almost feel yourself missing it while you were still there. Green captures this delicious melancholy in “Looking for Alaska,”
"Ghosts in the Stacks" / Christine Smallwood
__ (It is filled with marvellous details and set pieces, like the one in which John Ruskin, reared on hairless sculptures of female nudes, defers consummating his marriage to Effie Gray for so long that she sues for divorce.)
__ The alphabet is great, but there is nothing quite as arbitrary as one’s own past choices.
_____________________________________
"The Siege of Miami" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ It was hard to tell how seriously he took any of these ideas; even if one of them turned out to be workable, the effort required to, in effect, caulk the entire island seemed staggering.
"Through the Looking Glass" / Carolyn Kormann
__ Leeuwenhoek had an intensive routine of oral prophylaxis, which involved rubbing salt on his teeth each morning and buffing his molars with a cloth after meals. Nevertheless, he wrote, the plaque lay “thick as if ’twere batter.” He scraped some off, mixed it with rainwater, deposited a droplet on one of his microscopes, and held it up to the light. The sample was teeming with “many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.”
__ He calls it the Foldscope, and it comes in a kit. (Mine arrived in a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope.) The paper is printed with botanical illustrations and perforated with several shapes, which can be punched out and, with a series of origami-style folds, woven together into a single unit. The end result is about the size of a bookmark. The lens—a speck of plastic, situated in the center—provides a hundred and forty times magnification. The kit includes a second lens, of higher magnification, and a set of stick-on magnets, which can be used to attach the Foldscope to a smartphone, allowing for easy recording of a sample with the phone’s camera.
__ His entries included a replica of the Exxon Valdez, the oil tanker that ran aground off the Alaskan coast in 1989, and an anatomically accurate rabbit skeleton made from the stinking corpses of two rabbits. (“They have about as many bones as a human,” Prakash said.)
"Negotiating the Whirlwind" / David Remnick
__ The farrago of competing national interests, the legacies of historical blunders, the fantastical cast of characters, the sheer bloodlust, the prospect of regional if not global conflict—all conspire to make Kerry’s task in Syria nearly impossible.
__ We arrived late in the evening, which was perfect, because Saudi officials, like moonflowers, bloom at night.
Emily Nussbaum: It all seems like a replay of the same nightmare scenario: say yes to anything and you’ve signed away your right to ever say no. “I want everything to be my fault,” one female character says, on “Jessica Jones.” “Means I have some control.”
"Shades of White" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ There was, as there remains, something monkish about his submission to austere forms and procedures. For a while, in the early sixties, he flirted with color and with mildly decorative effects, such as layering whites atop reds and blues. It was as if he were straining against a principled compunction and toward an indulgence in the hedonistic rewards of painting.
__ I well remember the pleasant shock of his show at Virginia Dwan’s gallery, on Fifty-seventh Street, in 1971, of identically big, square, white paintings on sheets of vinyl, which were held to the wall by paint that ran over their edges. (Tiny blank patches showed, where pieces of masking tape had secured the vinyl while the paint dried.) It was like entering a luminous fog bank in which nothing—except everything—was palpable. Under its spell, you could deem even the most astringent works of other artists fatally fussy.
___________________________________
"Clean Plate Club" / Bill Buford
__ The cooks who had gathered on the corner were Barber’s staff and would be not only making the lunch but also serving it. (“They’re the only people who could possibly explain the dishes,” he said.)
__ He smeared a green dressing on the side of a wooden bowl. “This is the landing pad. You pile the salad on top.” “Landing pad,” in kitchen vernacular, means something like an anchor: it keeps food from sliding off a serving dish.
Alec Wilkinson:
__ “I’m an aggregator,” Ryan said. “It’s a useful talent, but sometimes I worry that you haven’t put deep thought into what you’re doing in the world,” Pattengale said. “Just because I include attributions doesn’t mean I don’t know,” Ryan said.
"The Accused" / Jiayang Fan
__ In a sense, Abacus’s customers—with their limited financial horizons and their reliance on networks of trust—were living the thrifty lives that small-town Americans once prided themselves on. Whereas the financial crisis was caused by mainstream American banks making loans that they knew were likely to result in default, the low rate of default at Abacus showed the bank to be uncannily astute in reckoning the financial capacity of its borrowers. As an op-ed in a Chinatown newspaper put it, “If every bank behaved like Abacus, the financial crisis wouldn’t have occurred.”
__ However, unspoken in many discussions about the Chinatown economy is the issue of tax evasion.
"The Populist Prophet" / Margaret Talbot
__ (Sanders) had devised his own equivalent of Sterno, which his friends dubbed Berno. “It was a roll of toilet paper soaked in lighter fluid inside a coffee can,” Rader said. “He’d cook over that.”
"The Network Man" / Nicholas Lemann
__ Hoffman used game logic to solve the problem: “The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you.” He went to the chief bully, and said that if he continued to hassle him, “ ‘I will break everything you own.’ He stopped.”
Louis Menand:
That’s how Donald Trump got his start. In 1974, when he was twenty-eight and had never built a thing in Manhattan, he set out to acquire property owned by the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. One of those pieces was the Grand Commodore Hotel, on Forty-second Street, next to Grand Central. According to Trump’s account, in his first book, “The Art of the Deal” (required reading for those of us preparing for a Trump Presidency), he got the city to agree to let him pay taxes on the property based on its assessed value in 1975. Trump renovated the hotel, and, in 1980, it reopened as the Grand Hyatt. The tax abatement was good for forty years, and is estimated to have been worth sixty million dollars in its first decade.
_____________________________________
"Holding the T" / Tad Friend
__ I would wake at 5 a.m., the hour of remorse, pinned by cares: overdue tax payments; overdue museum-permission forms; an overdue article; Roth I.R.A. regret.
__ Since then, though, some stealth riptide had carried me away from myself. I’d become the guy who petered out. The gap between who I thought I was and the iPad double everyone else saw was the precise measure of my disarray.
__ These friendships are usually squash-specific: we play, postmortem a bit, then part. But they’re stamped by the pleasure of jamming together, of collaborating on a jubilant rag of hissing strings, percussive splats, sneaker squeaks, and winded grunts. When the game soars like that, the showers are an Olympic platform. A squash-playing friend of mine, when asked to name his favorite body of water, wrote, “The showers at the Racquet Club.”
"Little Henry, Happy at Last" / Adam Gopnik
- Henry is, in his memoirs, a constant reproach to the creative-writing teacher’s insistence on giving the reader the particulars of things. The more his descriptions shimmer, the less they really show. They work, like Monet’s water lilies, from all-over radiance, not realistic detail.
- He makes much of a fire-fighting accident in 1861, narrated at length but still left majestically befogged, in which he seems to be saying that his balls were crushed while he was turning the water crank of a fire engine.
- Well, why would someone make such a solemn, self-reproachful fuss about a bad back? One answer is that making an undue fuss about minor ailments is exactly the kind of thing that the James brothers did. (Constipation is to the James letters what damnation is to Dr. Johnson’s: the obsessive worry.)
- We like an author who gives it to us straight, no matter how fancy his prose style may be. James has a tricksy manner, but his purpose in his memoirs is touchingly transparent: to say how the big moments of his life felt exactly as they happened. Each page is lit up by the bright light of memory, then is crumpled by the aging hand of scruple, only to be smoothed out again by the comfort of fine old feelings: It looked like this! Did it really look like this? Well, it sure felt like this while I was looking. The simple end of offering a re-creation of one life’s moments remains, if guarded by enough ironic intelligence, perfectly attainable.
