“Few great men — and I use the term precisely, for Pup was a great man — do not assert total control over their domains. I doubt Winston Churchill ever said, ‘Whatever.’”
2. “Same-Sex Ruling Belies the Staid Image of Iowa”
“This reluctance to interlope in the lives of one’s neighbors — ‘a very Iowa attitude,’ in the words of one local political scientist, derived in part from the state’s rural heritage — may help explain how Iowa finds itself in this moment. Add to that individualistic sensibility the state’s current political alignment and its little-known, pioneering legal past on once similarly volatile questions, like segregation and the role of women, and suddenly it seems far less surprising to outsiders that this could happen here in the seemingly endless, rolling acres of cornfields.”
3. “Jeremy Tyler, N.B.A. Prospect, Is Groomed to Play His Own Way”
“He said he worked out about eight hours a day, called himself ‘addicted’ to lifting weights and said he did not eat dessert and had never been drunk.
‘I have a vision, and my vision is to make the pros and have a successful life,’ he said. ‘Partying and all that stuff isn’t in my arsenal.’”
4. “N.B.A.’s Undercover Secret: Players’ Protective Pads”
“‘Basketball is the most physical noncontact sport in the world.’”
5. “With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?”
“The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.”
“One reason our brains persist in using stereotypes, experts say, is that often they give us broadly accurate information, even if all the details don’t line up. Ms. Boyle’s looks, for example, accurately telegraphed much about her biography, including her socioeconomic level and lack of worldly experience.”
7. “New Team Retrofits the Old Starship”
“Whereas Star Trek seemed closed off to newcomers — ‘It always presumed you cared about this group of characters,’ he said — The Twilight Zone was inviting, offering a self-contained origin story in each episode.”
“In Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer, Emanuel Levy, a film critic and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, makes the case that Minnelli was largely responsible for elevating movie musicals from their earlier incarnation as filmed vaudeville into sophisticated middlebrow entertainments by integrating musical numbers into the plot.”
9. “Great and Terrible Truths”
“Standing before the graduates of Kenyon College, Wallace opted for a tonal simplicity only occasionally evident in the hedge mazes of his fiction. He spoke about the difficulty of empathy (‘Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of’), the importance of being well adjusted (‘which I suggest to you is not an accidental term’) and the essential lonesomeness of adult life (‘lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation’). Truthful, funny and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else — the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him, but here he was, today, having beaten it, having made it through.”
“It’s not that Twitter doesn’t have a value to society. Its ability to spread news (as in the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River) or to circumvent repression (as in Moldovan youths organizing protests) has already proved transformative. But not every new mode of communication lends itself to politics, where speed and complexity rarely coexist.”
“Commenters … rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out 100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another. But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.”
