“The exercise feels a little like a last gasp.”
2. “Movie and Book Explore Link Between Board and Bedroom”
Chess as a metaphor for sex may seem far-fetched, but it has been used before, as in a tension-laden scene between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair. What may seem even more far-fetched is the idea that there is a way to apply ideas about sex to improve chess skills, and vice versa. But Natalia Pogonina, who is No. 17 among women, and her husband are writing a book about just that. The book is titled Chess Kamasutra.
3. “Bob Noorda Is Dead at 82; Designer Took Modernism Underground”
“He and Mr. Vignelli set about standardizing the type family to make sure that the signs were cleaner and clearer; they settled on Helvetica, originally a Swiss design known for its sans serif economy and sterility, against a white background. Mr. Noorda worked on every detail, from typeface selection to color coding. He ‘had a very systematic mind,’ Mr. Vignelli said, adding that ‘his work was extremely civilized.’”
4. “Making Sense of the New Political Anger”
“Two different protests are under way. One, most visible on the left, is rooted in traditional populism that favors increased government. The other, on the right, springs from a purist strain in American politics that distrusts government altogether.”
5. “The Book Club With Just One Member”
“The collective literary experience certainly has its benefits. Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. Social reading may even persuade you that you liked something you thought you didn’t. There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. ‘The pursuit of reading,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘is carried on by private people.’”
6. “Disaster Coverage Without Having to Roll Up the Sleeves”
“An odd thing happens in a disaster, and that is how it bares the underlying language of clothes. It underscores the information that clothes traditionally transmit about where people stand in society, who they are and what tasks they perform.”
7. “This Article Is Not Yet Rated”
“Social scientists doggedly pursue evidence of correlations between on- and off-screen behavior, while some commentators insist that no such connections could possibly exist. The rest of us know perfectly well that we don’t play with anvils and dynamite just because we see Wile E. Coyote do it, though perhaps those Looney Tunes are cautionary tales. But we also can acknowledge that our actions, our fantasies and the pictures we consume are not all that far apart. And it is for precisely this reason — in recognition of the unique and dazzling impact of an art form that is also a mass medium compounded of big pictures and good-looking people — that movies have always attracted the attention of censors.”
“The time to visit this megacity — about 20 million people live in the metropolitan area — has rarely been better.”
“Gawande, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and a staff writer at The New Yorker, makes the case that checklists can help us manage the extreme complexity of the modern world.”
“In viewing capitalism as an extension of a culture unique to a particular time and place, Appleby is understandably contemptuous of those who posit, in the spirit of Adam Smith, that capitalism was a natural outgrowth of human nature. She is equally scornful of those who believe that its emergence was in any way inevitable or inexorable.”
“A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.”
“Cultivating and stylizing accents in order to stand out as part of a subculture — to represent, in other words — may be as American as the melting pot.”
“There is no computer in Patterson’s office; he writes in longhand on a legal pad and gives the pages to his assistant to type up. Hanging above the round wooden table where he works is a photograph of President Clinton taken during the Monica Lewinsky scandal walking down the steps of Marine One with a copy of Patterson’s When the Wind Blows tucked under his arm. (Patterson’s popularity in Washington is apparently bipartisan: the wall of one of his downstairs bathrooms is plastered with fan mail from both George Bushes.) Neatly arranged on an adjacent L-shaped desk were 23 stacks of paper of varying heights, Patterson’s works in progress.”
