TNY weekend reader: take your vitamin TNY
(image: carolita johnson)
Ever wonder what happens to the DVDs you sent back to Netflix? Read about the Netflix fairies in Susan Sheehan’s Talk of the Town piece, “Tear, Slap, Clack.” If you ever wondered what happened to Gigi, aka Leslie Caron, Kate Taylor’s got the goods on her upcoming appearance in Law and Order: Gigi in Jersey. And Adam Gopnik thinks we should all read at least as much as the President of the United States does. Which may explain his “compulsory reading list for us all” at the end of “Read it and Weep.”
In one of those wonderful instances where a picture is worth 912 words, the illustration by Christoph Niemann that accompanies James Surowiecki’s “Private Lies“ pretty much says it all, but I read the piece anyway, just to confirm what I’d surmised about that two-headed dragon.
Read how Walter Reuther’s vision of broadly collectivized risk, rejected in the 1940’s, may finally be coming back home to roost: Gladwell’s “The Risk Pool.” (My cartoon appears amongst those pages, page 34 to be exact!).
I’m glad I didn’t read John Lahr’s “Petrified: the horrors of stagefright” (not online) before my appearance in The Rejection Show, Tuesday! Reading it on the subway yesterday, I had vague memories of sensations that correspond perfectly to the symptoms described. Luckily I was too busy trying to get through it all to stop and become a pillar of salt. I’m the kind of person to fall apart afterwards. Which didn’t happen because my friends were there to buy me a miniburger and a drink. (Thanks Em!)
If a model can read and then summarize Gödel’s Proof in 1990 on a sunny veranda in Mallorca in order to impress her Lacanian psychoanalyst/mathemetician boyfriend (me, I’m talking about me, who proved that love makes all things possible), there’s no reason for any non-mathemetician not to become engrossed in Sylvia Nasar’s and David Gruber’s “Manifold Destiny” (not online) about just who solved the Poincaré conjecture. It’s worth reading just to learn a little about topology, my favorite “area of mathematics.” It’s like playing with modelling clay, but in your head. I call it vitamin T, because topology’s good for your brain. No need to take it very far, the basics and a little Möbius-gazing will do you just fine.
“How was it to be dead?,” an excerpt from Richard Ford’s third Frank Bascombe novel, puzzled me for while. But when I finished it, I understood exactly why Sally did what she did. Frank, her second husband, and the narrator, was definitely due for a come-uppance. What was his crime? Thinking he had it all figured out, basically. Never do that! Amusingly enough, something about his whole discourse also seems to translate the opening strains of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana into, “O FATE! You’re like the moon! Ever waxing, ever waning! You asshole!” For more about Frank, read Deborah Treisman’s Q & A with Ford, Online Only.
