The New Yorker 2016-07-11,18, 2016-07-25, 2016-08-01, 2016-08-08,15

[fiefoe]

"Cool Runnings" / Adam Gopnik
__ (Nearly a tenth of the population was in France to watch the Euros—as though, people said repeatedly, many millions of Americans had travelled with their national team, another instance of ecstatic numerical aphasia.)
__ Icelandic players and their coaches have the same flexible career definitions as the politicians: one coach doubles as a dentist, the goalkeeper as a filmmaker, while the color commentator has a share in the café where I had had breakfast with Heiða.

"Trump Days" / George Saunders

• In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an _accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to _say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it.
• Apply Occam’s razor: if someone brags this much, bending every ray of light back to himself, what’s the simplest explanation?
• Standing in line at the pharmacy in an Amarillo Walmart superstore, I imagined some kid who had moved only, or mostly, through such bland, bright spaces, spaces constructed to suit the purposes of distant profit, and it occurred to me how easy it would be, in that life, to feel powerless, to feel that the local was lame, the abstract extraneous, to feel that the only valid words were those of materialism (“get” and “rise”)—words that are perfectly embodied by the candidate of the moment.
• Even though their votes now seem technically meaningless, there is no mass exodus. The people just keep coming. They’ve raced over from work, weary kids trudging along beside them. They are fantastically old people; people in terrible health, in wheelchairs or hobbling along on walkers, or joining me on my bench to stretch out a stiff leg or adjust a bad back. What makes them do it? Keep standing in line, after dark, at the end of a long day, to vote in an election that is already over? <> A young woman says, cheerfully, to her toddler, “Don’t hit yourself. You only have one face, one head. That carries your brain. Which is very important.”

"The Threshold" / Larissa MacFarquhar
__ Dying can be long and bewildering, lonely and painful, frequently undignified, and consumed by pressing and unpredictable and constantly changing and multiplying needs. It’s a relief to have someone around who understands what’s going on and what may happen next. On the other hand, when dying is long it becomes ordinary, just another kind of living, but one in which your friends may be gone and your children busy, or not busy enough. In that case, it can be a good thing to see someone who is not a member of your family; who comes from the world outside your illness; who has known you long enough to be familiar but not long enough to have heard your stories already;

"Empathy for the Devil" / Emily Nussbaum
__ But, for a few hours, her life is full of jittery serendipity:
__ Empathy can be a bully’s demand: Feel my pain.

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"Gotcha!" / Michael Schulman
__ Around the country, robbers have targeted players by staking out Pokéstops.
__ she said. “There are parallels. You need a device with which to spot the bird, and so instead of high-power binoculars it’s mediated with a screen.” However, she added, “I have deep reservations about the idea of Pokémon Go as a flâneur-type activity.

"Flying High" / Ryan Lizza
__ In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt broke away from the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party, which championed political reforms, women’s suffrage, and workers’ rights. Roosevelt won twenty-seven per cent of the vote, the best result of any third-party candidate in American history. The Democrats and the Republicans included most of the Progressives’ issues in their platforms, and the Party was largely defunct by the next Presidential election.
__ Weld compared the Republican Party, in its crisis over Trump’s nomination, to the Whig Party in its final years. The Whig Party splintered in the mid-eighteen-fifties, Weld noted, and some former members drifted into the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. Like Trump’s rallies, Weld said, Know-Nothing rallies “had a lot of violence, they fomented a lot of conspiracy theories about people trying to overthrow the United States. They were nativists, they were—they called it racialist then, not racist. But they were everything that Mr. Trump’s overtones are today. And they became very powerful for a few short years, and then they disappeared.”

"Captain of Her Soul" / Rachel Aviv
__ Nussbaum is drawn to the idea that creative urgency—and the commitment to be good—derives from the awareness that we harbor aggression toward the people we love.
__ She divides her day into a series of productive, life-affirming activities, beginning with a ninety-minute run or workout, during which, for years, she “played” operas in her head, usually works by Mozart. She memorized the operas and ran to each one for three to four months, shifting the tempo to match her speed and her mood.
__ Nussbaum once wrote of Iris Murdoch that she “won the Oedipal struggle too easily.” The same could be said of Nussbaum herself.

Peter Schjeldahl on Alma Thomas:
Wielding brushes, Thomas eschewed the group’s signal technique of working strictly with stains of liquid paint on raw canvas, proving it inessential to an ordered glory of plangent hues. She seemed to absorb in a gulp the mode’s ideas—rational means, hedonistic appeals—and to add, with no loss of formal integrity, a heterodox lyricism inspired by nature.

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"Updates from Your FedEx Package" / Colin Stokes

"Body of Work" / Alice Gregory
__ Famously private, he despised his contemporaries’ infatuation with “uninhabitable” glass houses and thought that shadows were “a basic human need.”

"How Rousseau Predicted Trump" / Pankaj Mishra

• In his major writings, beginning in the seventeen-fifties, Rousseau thrived on his loathing of metropolitan vanity, his distrust of technocrats and of international trade, and his advocacy of traditional mores.
• He claims that he sat down by the roadside and spent the next hour in a trance, drenching his coat in tears, overcome by the insight that progress, contrary to what Enlightenment philosophes said about its civilizing and liberating effects, was leading to new forms of enslavement.
• In any case, his prize-winning entry in the contest, published in 1750 as his first philosophical work, “A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences,” abounded in dramatic claims. The arts and sciences, he wrote, were “garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh [men] down,” and “our minds have been corrupted in proportion” as human knowledge has increased. By the mid-eighteenth century, Paris’s intellectuals had erected a standard of civilization for others to follow. In Rousseau’s view, the newly emergent intellectual and technocratic class did little more than provide literary and moral cover for the powerful and the unjust.
• Against this moral and intellectual revolution, which came after centuries of submission before throne and altar, Rousseau launched a counterrevolution. The word “finance,” he said, is “a slave’s word,” and the secret workings of financial systems are a “means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block.” Anticipating today’s Brexiters, he claimed that despite England’s political and economic might, the country offered its citizens only a bogus liberty
• Donald Trump may find much philosophical backup in “Émile; or, On Education.” “Every patriot is severe with strangers,” Rousseau wrote. “They are nothing in his eyes.”
• Against today’s backdrop of political rage, however, Rousseau seems to have grasped, and embodied, better than anyone the incendiary appeal of victimhood in societies built around the pursuit of wealth and power.
• But it was the socially maladjusted Genevan, whose writings Tocqueville claimed to read every day, who first attacked modernity for the unjust way in which power accrues to a networked élite.
• It is uprooted people with Rousseau’s complex wounds who have periodically made and unmade the modern world with their demands for radical equality and cravings for stability.

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"The War and the Roses" / Jill Lepore
__ And here, at last, was the resolution, shaky and cynical, of the argument between the people and progress. People + progress = children. In an age of atrocity, the unruliness of the people and a fear of the future have combined with terror, naked terror, to make the love of children an all-purpose proxy for each fraying bond, each abandoned civic obligation, the last, lingering devotion.

"The Duo That Dominates Dressage" / Sam Knight
__ The freestyle probably saved dressage, but it masks the sport’s essential grandeur. No other event in Rio this summer can claim Xenophon, the ancient Greek general and student of Socrates, as its first coach. Xenophon’s “On Horsemanship,” written in the fourth century B.C., contains training exercises that are still used in dressage, as well as the sport’s ethical rationale: “Anything forced or misunderstood can never be beautiful.”
__ The mysteries of dressage are many and not unrelated to love. Young horses mature well or badly. Riders fall and lose their nerve. There is always a search for the feeling of connection, and no guarantee that you will find it. Horses impossible for one rider will dance for somebody else. Mediocre riders flourish on horses given up for the same reason. There are relationships that make everybody better than they ever were, and there are horses and riders that simply never meet.

"Love in Translation" / Lauren Collins

• Ink to a nib, my heart surged.
• For better or worse, there was something off about us, in the way that we homed in on each other’s sentences, focussing too intently, as though we were listening to the radio with the volume a notch too low. “You don’t seem like a married couple,” someone said, minutes after meeting us at a party. We fascinated each other and frustrated each other. We could go exhilaratingly fast or excruciatingly slow, but we often seemed hard pressed to find a reliable intermediate setting, a conversational cruise control. We didn’t possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem to be able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.
• When I try out a new word, I feel conspicuous, as though I’m test-driving a car I can’t afford.
• French words are connected by the liaison system, in which a word ending in a consonant links to the next one if it begins with a vowel. They’re impressionable, a little bit fickle, behaving differently depending on whom they’re with. A French word, if all its friends did, would definitely jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.
• But in French conformity was my ambition. Speaking offered a sense of community, the rare chance to crowdsource my personal thesaurus. I was trying to join in, not to distinguish myself. I wasn’t a writer but a speaker. I wasn’t an observer but a participant. It was such a happy thing to strive for a cliché.
• But, if first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.

"Jay McInerney’s Middle-Aged Malaise" / Adelle Waldman
__ Russell’s charismatic friend Washington, for example, has “the ability to convince, if only to the point that you felt it would be very stuffy to believe completely in your own position, or for that matter in anything. It would be so uncool.”