1. “When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books”
“I recently scrutinized my library to see how many unread books had disgusting covers. The results were staggering.”
2. “Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now”
“The iPhone is something different. It’s changing our behavior.”
3. “Is Money Tainting the Plasma Supply”
“Hundreds, probably thousands, of Mexicans … come to the United States to trade their plasma for dollars.”
“Jerry is a full-blooded avatar of the Protestant-Emersonian tradition that continues to flourish, often unrecognized, in American civic culture, and in our popular art as well. He believes, above all — and the movie all but insists — that it is possible for apparently discrepant values and identities to be perfectly congruent. Decency, wealth, love, fame: these are not contradictory but rather mutually reinforcing expressions of that secular grace known as happiness. We are innately entitled to pursue it, and a broad highway and a good car will only speed the capture.”
5. “An Actor Nails the Cadence and the Charm”
“As someone who studied Mr. Mandela over the course of three years while he replaced an apartheid regime with a genuine democracy, I found Mr. Freeman’s performance in the film Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, uncanny — less an impersonation than an incarnation.”
6. “He Wears a Revealing Sort of Restraint”
“He has an understated way of putting things. Asked about his trim physique, he attributed his newfound interest in the gym to the image-conscious exhortations of Tom Ford, who directed him in (and wrote the screenplay for) the forthcoming film A Single Man. ‘He told me I looked good, but I’d look better if I had a personal trainer,’ Mr. Firth explained. Perhaps the conversation went a bit differently. ‘I told him he was fat,’ Mr. Ford recalled later.”
6. “The Man Who Sang, Played and Smiled”
“The book is marred only by excess erudition. Teachout loves to show off his cultural smarts; he’s the sort to include a reference to the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony without bothering to say who wrote it. One can’t help thinking he cites Philip Larkin and Herbert von Karajan and Jackson Pollock and Le Corbusier and Kingsley Amis and Darius Milhaud not just to tout Armstrong, but to toss around their names. Armstrong forever railed against people (including a couple of his wives) for putting on ‘aires’; he called a king of England ‘Rex’ to his face, and joked about his lovemaking to a pope. Pops (it’s what everyone who really knew him called him) might describe Pops the way he once characterized Fletcher Henderson’s band: ‘a little stuck up.’”
“What makes him such a successful sportswriter, after all, is that he can flat out write. The Book of Basketball is a few hundred pages too long, but it’s never boring. Because practically every page features Simmons performing feats like perfectly encapsulating the career of Patrick Ewing (‘a second banana masquerading as a first banana’) or vividly psychoanalyzing Kevin McHale’s habit of raising his arms in victory after Celtic road wins (‘the one N.B.A. legend who felt obligated to rub his armpits in the collective faces of 18,000 fans’), the book is guaranteed to hold a reader’s interest.”
“Using a language of archetypes and symbols to speak to the conscious mind, the unconscious offered a means toward self-awareness far more profound than the groping of consciousness alone. Armed with this conviction, Jung embarked on a journey into his own unexplored depths.”
8. “Visuals: The Art of the Word”
“The look of a typeface can determine how readers perceive a word or phrase. Take the common seasonal greeting ‘Happy holidays.’ When set in an ornamented Latin style, the words appear jolly and joyous, while spiky Old English or German Fraktur reads as dour — Scrooge-like. Various typefaces symbolize the holidays, and not just those goofy novelty faces with dangling icicles or sprigs of holly. Ecclesiastical gothics, bifurcated Tuscans and filigreed slab serifs are fitting styles for this season. Display types are designed to convey a host of notions and emotions. They are as versatile (and functional) as articles of clothing — and as with clothing, some types are basic black, while others go in and out of fashion like hemlines.”
“I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.”
“Do audiences really care if aliens on the silver screen are speaking in well-formed sentences?”
“Design for design’s sake, our history suggests, is not an American priority. Instead, we design things to do a certain job (whether it’s in a mine, an office or a basketball arena), and when we devise a solution to the challenge, especially one that’s ingenious, simple or cheap, the result is a forward leap in style that may not even seem like one at first. (Until the Japanese trend scouts come along and hawk it in Tokyo department stores.)”
“In this big-is-better environment, a new independent movement has emerged. It has the (unfortunate) title of ‘mumblecore,’ a cinematic genre that focuses on characters, mostly in their mid to late 20s, who are caught somewhere between college and adulthood. Although the characters in these films don’t actually mumble, they are, mostly, in a state of in-between-ness. Emotions are keenly felt but, as in life, not always clearly enunciated. Characters are neither poor nor rich, particularly successful nor unsuccessful — they’re a little aimless, but aware of that aimlessness. It’s a limbo world: stories of ill-timed love affairs, small misunderstandings between friends, missed cues and minor victories. The intimacy of the genre is its strength; the nature of youth — and all that represents, even into middle age — is the heartbeat of these movies.”
