Matins

¶ At GOOD, Noam Ross asks, “If Everyone Moves to the City, What Gets Left Behind?” His accompanying graphic is a bit less exciting. Although China’s rural population is predicted to drop by half, 2000-2050, the rest of Asia and Africa look to be stable. The thin slice of country-dwellers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania is expected to drop by about a third. Still, this is an interesting think piece. One thing that goes unmentioned is that rural poverty will probably increase sharply in regions not served by railroads. ¶ Also at GOOD, an important word about elevators, which Alex Goldmark rightly calls the capillaries of urban life.

Lauds

¶ No one is going to be surprised that we wish the Guardian had spoken a little more firmly: “Behind the music: Why music education cuts could be a dumb move.” Could be?  How on earth are talented kids who don’t happen to be rich going to be discovered and nurtured without publicly-funded programs? Scratching our heads about Helienne Lindvall‘s version of this perennial story, we wondered if there’s a positive explanation for why music ed is always the first to go in Anglophone schools: it’s classical, and our natural tradition is vernacular. (Can there be any doubt that English-speaking writers and composers, born no matter where, have generated the richest spectrum of popular song forms?) This is no excuse for failing to educate children in the arts, but understanding the weakness of political support is a start. (via Arts Journal) ¶ In “Link Rot,” Connor O’Brien wants us to bear in mind how easily the whole Internet thing could callapse into a state of 404. Of course we already knew how right he is but his talking about it gave us asthsma. (The Bygone Bureau)

Prime

¶ We’re hoping that Max Chafkin‘s much-talked-about Norway piece, “In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism,” inaugurates a truly serious examination of the relation between rates of taxation and prosperity. It seems, offhand, to be the very reverse of what the Reaganauts told us it was. “Socialism” seems a strong word for the Norwegian régime, which tolerates, after all, the likes of coiffeur-queen Inger Ellen Nicolaisen, the “Donald Trump of Norway.” She pays plenty beaucoup taxes, but she still owns plenty beaucoup. We don’t remember plenty beaucoup property rights as a feature of textbook socialism. Chafkin’s piece is a must-read, even though, at the end of the day, there are only five million Norwegians to share all that North Sea oil. ¶ At Weakonomics, Philip touchingly wonders if capitalism might be at an “inflection point,” by which he means (and hopes) that capitalists might see the advantage of taking a longer view than the quarterly. (No doubt, that sounds like socialism!) We quite agree with the point that he makes toward the end of the entry: “I like to support programs that solve problems before they start…” Poor corporate governance is definitely the place where trouble starts.  

Tierce

¶ A recent study correlating two genes with behavioral probability, one with friendship and one with aversion, is almost laughingly preliminary and — literally — precocious. The correlations may have been established, but working out their meanings, much less their mechanics, will take years, if only to amass correlations for hundreds if not thousands of other genes. But the research is probably on the right track, and it will be fought vehemently by people who refuse to recognize free will as an unpredictable distallate of chaotic events, deterministic at the atomic level but not higher up. Patrick Morgan reports at Discoblog. ¶ We’re wondering if there’s a gene that explains why some people get worried about whether one or two spaces follows the full stop. We strongly believe in inserting two spaces between the abbreviation for a state and the ZIP code on an evelope, but that’s not what’s agitating Farhad Manjoo.  We’re having so many problems with the idiocies of Platform WordPress that we don’t feel entitled to venture an opinion. (Slate)

Sext

¶ The bloom is definitely off the rose so far as business blogging is concerned. Ben Bradley, a marketer in Illinois, told Lisa Bertagnoli that blogging “wasn’t a giant time investment, but I’d rather be on the phone with a client.” Plus,  sales calls were whoppingly more effective. (via The Awl) ¶ Leigh Alexander catalogues Five Emotions Invented By The Internet. Unfortunately, they go unnamed. “The need to say something has lapsed and leaves a dim, fatigued sensation in its place. In advanced cases, a sensation approximating ‘headache’ but not as tangible nor identifiable as ‘headache’ sets in.” We think that Alexander must have been reading Oblomov. (Thought Catalog, via kottke.org)

Nones

¶ Meet Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister. James Traub profiles the man from Konya who both intellectually and diplomatically argues for Turkey’s importance in international affairs — not as the “sick man of Europe,” but as quite the opposite, a conciliating power. Mr Davutoglu’s program may have been swamped by the Mavi Marmara incident, and Traub suggests that he may have overestimated Turkey’s importance — a possibility that would not surprise his critics. (NYT)  ¶ Faced with one of Edward Hugh‘s prodigiously comprehensive analyses of economic developments, we glance over the introduction and shoot straight to the conclusion, which in the case of “Turkey’s Audacious Experiment In ‘Post-Modern’ Monetary Policy“ provides a persuasive examination of the factors that have put Turkey on a path that’s contrary to ours (and to Europe’s as well);  beyond that, you’ll get a sense of why the outlook for “young” economies — which unlike ours are not immediately saddled with the problem of ageing populations — is so rosy. (A Fistful of Euros) BTW: How to deal with the problem of ageing populations? Throw open the doors to immigration, that’s how!

Vespers

¶ Rodney Welch writes lucidly and with great pleasure about two of Henry James’s three big late novels — The Ambassadors and The Golden Bvwl — which have at long last appeared in Library of America volumes. (The Millions)

You’re in the company of a writer who sees and imagines in depth. I occasionally thought “Where is he going with this?” but I also thought “I can’t wait to see where he goes with this.” There’s a purpose behind those metaphors – he wants you to see, to visualize the inner life of his characters. He knows how people think, and he has a superb sense of how they reveal themselves, the way looks give away clues, the way people may not even know their own mind until they see another person’s reaction. These novels are set against great geographical backdrops and big fancy homes, but all the action is inside, where people plot, conceal, and create. These novels are broad French comedies and existential mysteries, stories you understand piece-meal, along with the characters, who are feeling and (quite often) thinking their way through.

¶ “So what are we to make of the Major and his minors?” asks Brooks Peters, in an essay at Open Book about the ardent canoeist, naturist, and ephebist, Rowland Raven-Hart, a tall, thin, bearded gent who appears to have had no trouble in the world picking up legions of comely youths to accompany him on his paddlings through Europe and elsewhere. Prepare for Major eye-rolling, is what we make of it.

Compline

¶ Do we value killing? This odd question is posed by philosopher Alva Noë, at NPR’s 13.7. Grappling with the Tucson shootings, Noë argues that emergencies, far from triggering instinctive responses, reveal our values; and that the contingencies of the event determine which values will be revealed. “Why is one man a war criminal, and the other a great soldier? Look to the situations in which they respectively find themselves to answer this.” (via Arts Journal) ¶ Any doubts that American society values killing will be killed by Charles Blow‘s graphic report, correlating firearms possessions with per capita homicides. The United States is in a class by itself, it seems. (Any doubts that handguns have any other purpose than to wound and kill other human beings ought to be cleared up by a moment’s sober and honest thought.) (NYT)

Have a Look

¶ Felicia Honkasolo. (The Best Part)

Noted

¶ “How to Actually Read Things on the Internet.” (My Life Scoop)

¶ Dan Hill’s illustrated account of the Australian floods. (City of Sound)

¶ The Philosophical Novel. By the way, what would David Foster Wallace have looked like had a good barber tended his hair? (NYT)

Holland Cotter captures a moment in New York’s artly life that spun bravely at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in the early Fifties: a collaboration of painting and poetry in which the poetry was arguably the more remarkable partner. But the paintings still gleam, poised beautifully between the bellows of Abstract Expressionism and the banalities of Pop.

And a scene it was: amorous, rivalrous and incestuous; at once an avant-garde and — much like the New York art world at present — an avant-garde in reverse. Poetry was pushing into prickly new territory, while art was revisiting old ground, although with some new moves. What made the situation at Tibor de Nagy distinctive was that almost everyone was collaborating, artists and poets alike.

Remember the context. This was the high moment of Abstract Expressionism, with its image of the heroic artist battling his way alone toward some existential sublime. Set that image against another: O’Hara and Rivers, lovers at the time, sitting knee to knee as they worked on a series of jointly made lithographs, each adding drawings, jokes, notes to friends and poems like valentines.

Or consider the poetry books coming out under the Tibor de Nagy imprint, among them Mr. Ashbery’s first collection, with drawings by Ms. Freilicher, and O’Hara’s 1953 “Oranges,” with hand-painted covers by Hartigan. These weren’t weighty tomes. They were pretty pamphlets, so thin and fragile as to be all but invisible on a library shelf.

The Fighter, on the face of it, would not seem to be my kind of movie, and I went to it reluctantly. I did think that I ought to see it, and not just because of the Oscar buzz. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams are two stars who have never let me down, and I’d heard really great things about Melissa Leo. I’d like to say that Christian Bale was a draw, too, but although his work has always been interesting, it has also seemed intended to cloak the actor in plain sight, as though movie-making were the best way in the world of maintaining a very private life. It is also true that Mr Bale has never to my knowledge played the part of a character whom I’d want to grow up to be. Certainly this last part hasn’t been changed by David Russell’s film. Even after his dramatic conversion experience, Dickie Eklund remains an unattractive piece of work. But I came out of the theatre thrilled to death by the power of what I’d just seen, and I hope that no one will miss The Fighter because it’s “about boxing.” 

And it is about boxing. There were passages of family drama that led me to suspect that the pugilistics might be backgrounded, but that’s not what happens. In fact, I have never seen a movie that made boxing look so interestting. The final bout transformed me into a Mexican jumping bean, swaying with each blow; it’s a good thing that I sit in the back of the theatre. While nothing could ever make a boxing fan out of me, I saw that Mr Russell had always kept in view a distinction that Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) makes at the beginning, when he’s explaining boxing to Charlene (Amy Adams). There’s brawling, which is just guys exchanging blows, and there’s boxing, which is more like chess. Comparing boxing to chess might sound laughable, and most filmmakers would ask us to accept it on faith, but Mr Russell provides something close to a laboratory demonstration of the similarities. In almost every boxing scene that I’ve ever sat through, there’s a sense from the start that the fighters are giving their all to trying to win, as quickly as possible. But that’s not Micky Ward’s game, That Ward has a game is interesting. 

But I didn’t care about The Fighter because of the fighting. The multi-credited screenplay is a match of sorts between two venerable story lines. The one is a family tragedy: a heroic character isn’t strong enough, or mean enough, or whatever-you-like enough to step outside a toxic family circle, possibly because he is as addicted to the company of his relations as they’re addicted to trouble. The other is the modern American tale of rehab. The moment in which we find that we believe in the rehabilitation of Dickie Eklund, a former crack addict ( as well as the boxer who taught his little brother Micky everything he knows), the family tragedy story turns into a comeback story, and a very believable one. By this time, Micky has put together a team of supporters who agree on nothing so much as the importance of keeping Dickie out of Micky’s life. When Micky can’t decide between the warring camps (which we’re inclined, even though the movie turns out not to do, to see as good guys versus bad guys), his new friends leave him, and you think, uh-oh, so much for Micky.

But Dickie is awakened by their defection; and instead of taking advantage of his restored command of the field (as Micky’s trainer) he reaches out for the defectors’ support. As Charlene and O’Keefe (Mickey O’Keefe plays himself) understand, Micky’s dependence on his brother’s good advice is not weak or self-destructive: Dickie really does know the best moves. He also knows his brother better than anyone else. They don’t like Dickie, but they know that, so long as he’s clean, they have no good excuse for not working with him, so they undergo conversion experiences of their own. (Ms Adams is so good at registering the course of Charlene’s faith in Dickie that you think that you’re reading her mind.) It’s at this very point that the boxing story sweeps to the foreground for a stirring climax — a climax that would work out very differently if Micky’s various friends weren’t determined to get together to support him. 

Melissa Leo plays Alice Ward, the much-married mother of nine, among them the two boxers and six harridan Valkyries who hang out in her home and amplify her signs and signals. Alice is very much a type, but I’ve never seen the equal of Ms Leo’s impersonation. A hard and brittle hustler who’s too sentimental to grasp that she routinely favors her black sheep son, Dickie, over the straight-shooting Micky, Alice is all but blind to Dickie’s addiction. She’s as out of touch with reality as any of Tennessee Williams’s wilting Southern belles, but, being a lot tougher, she is not broken by the shattering portrayal of her family in an HBO documentary that is shown midway through the film. It’s unclear what she knows in advance about this project; one suspects that she has taken Dickie’s assurance that it’s about his comeback as the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts at his word. In fact, we don’t know different until just before the broadcast. The subject of the documentary is crack, and how completely it can ruin the life of someone like Dickie. It ends with his being led off to prison. In an addled attempt to raise money for Micky’s training, Dickie impersonates cops and shakes down the johns who pick up his tarts. It doesn’t take long for this scheme to come crashing down around him. Even for Alice, though, “documentary” doesn’t mean quite what it ought to, and when Dickie comes out of prison, she is almost eager to resume enabling him. She at risk of helping both of her sons right back into disappointment and failure. If The Fighter has a disappointment, it’s that Ms Leo is never given a scene to correspond to Mr Bale’s. 

Whether or not the filmmakers intended any such message, I watched The Fighter as itself something of a documentary, about the failure of our economy to provide millions of Americans with meaningful occupations even as it drowns them in consumerist trash. It is difficult to imagine why anyone with a interesting, well-paid job would take up professional boxing, and The Fighter does nothing to make it any easier.  

Mary Williams Walsh‘s front-page story about “state bankruptcy” reminded us of the combination of dithering leadership and intransigent special interests that brought the ancien régime to its knees in 1789 (curiously, the first full year of governance under our current Constitution).

House Republicans, and Senators from both parties, have taken an interest in the issue, with nudging from bankruptcy lawyers and a former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, who could be a Republican presidential candidate. It would be difficult to get a bill through Congress, not only because of the constitutional questions and the complexities of bankruptcy law, but also because of fears that even talk of such a law could make the states’ problems worse.

Lawmakers might decide to stop short of a full-blown bankruptcy proposal and establish instead some sort of oversight panel for distressed states, akin to the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which helped New York City during its fiscal crisis of 1975.

Still, discussions about something as far-reaching as bankruptcy could give governors and others more leverage in bargaining with unionized public workers.

“They are readying a massive assault on us,” said Charles M. Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “We’re taking this very seriously.”

[snip]

Many analysts say they consider a bond default by any state extremely unlikely, but they also say that when politicians take an interest in the bond market, surprises are apt to follow.

Public-sector workers versus municipal bondholders: a hardly unimaginable fight that no one seems to want to be bothered to imagine.

We can’t decide if Anthony Tommasini‘s talk of “making the cut” — as he puts together his list of top-ten classical composers — is silly or just plain odious. Here we find him struggling to make a decision about Chopin, about whom he writes very well.

Chopin, the most original genius of the 19th century, is a good example. Striving for greatness was the last thing on his mind. Chopin had his own select list of past greats he revered, topped by Bach and Mozart. And he loved bel canto opera, especially by that melancholic melodist Bellini.

But the Beethoven symphonic imperative that hung over and intimidated his fellow composers meant nothing to Chopin. He did not care about writing large, formal works, certainly not symphonies. Even his Second and Third Piano Sonatas (the First is an early work), though astounding, are completely unconventional. Chopin respected his composer colleagues, but he was not especially interested in their work. He was a pianist who composed. To him there was no distinction between the activities. And he seldom performed piano works by other composers.

Beethoven consciously strove to be great, even titanic, and he thought he was. His legacy is defined by intimidating bodies of symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas and more, now canonic. How does an individualist like Chopin “rank” in comparison? Chopin’s ethereal nocturnes, poetic ballades, audacious scherzos, aptly titled impromptus and lacy waltzes often sound like written-out improvisations.

It seems to us that Chopin’s success at honoring Bach and Mozart (and Scarlatti) while remaining outside the shadow of Beethoven is reason alone to place him in the pantheon — a pantheon built to honor however many great composers there are, not an arbitrary “top 10.”

If I’m a bit worn out today, it’s because I spent yesterday in the kitchen, making a batch of tomato soup, a boeuf à la bourguignonne, and a dozen dinner rolls. Actually, I wish I knew a recipe the yielded a dozen dinner rolls, but I’ve never seen one; most yield about two dozen, which is far too many. My solution yesterday was to make a loaf from half of the dough. And what do you know? The result is much more like the better store-bought sandwich bread than anything I’ve ever made. Is it the egg? The buttermilk? Interestingly, it takes on a slightly funny flavor when toasted. And using the tall and narrow loaf pan was a mistake. This is bread that wants to be squat.

As for the boeuf… The Creuset dutch oven had been in the oven for about forty minutes when it struck me that the kitchen was too hot. I took out the stew and was dismayed to see that it was boiling. I turned the oven down, from 325º to 300º, just to jigger the thermostat spring, which evidently hadn’t budged when I’d lowered the temperature from 450º. (The 450º setting was for an eight-minute searing of the browned, flour-dusted stew meat.) Of all the times for the oven to fritz out! Happily, I was there and I caught it. But at the end of the cooking time, the results, if not nearly as dire as Julie Powell’s (in Julie & Julia), were pretty dry. What ought to have been 2½ cups of sauce came to just over half of a cup. My improvisation was to stir in a lot of beef broth and about a half cup of cream into the sauce, and boil it down. Reduced, this amplified sauce tasted good but wasn’t very thick. Nevertheless, I decided that I’d fiddled with it enough. The pearl onions and the mushrooms, cooked separately, brightened the stew’s flavor, but the meat — well, there’s no doubting that that meat has been stewed.

The tomato soup remains to be puréed. After spinning in the Cuisinart for four minutes, batches of the soup are pressed through a chinois. I’ll get to it tomorrow… or maybe the next day.

A former national security adviser on China, Kenneth Lieberthal, when asked by the Times about the results of the meetings between Presidents Obama and Hu, said that it was pretty much all rhetoric. ““But at least new rhetoric is better than nothing.”

Both leaders should also reap domestic political benefits from their meeting. Mr. Hu’s enhanced stature, American analysts say, should help him tamp down political forces that have driven a more aggressive foreign policy and hamstrung relations with the United States and China’s Pacific neighbors in the last year.

Mr. Hu and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, “realize this assertiveness based in the last year on nationalism and the belief that the U.S. is declining has gotten them into deep trouble,” said Joseph S. Nye Jr., the dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a State Department and Pentagon official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Mr. Nye was in Washington for a luncheon with Mr. Hu at the State Department. “They think a summit which could be played as a success can give them ammunition to quiet down this rumbling below in the ranks.”

For his part, Mr. Obama comes away from the visit with a new reputation for toughness in his China policy, something that is likely to please conservatives and some liberals alike.

“Area President Whistles Happy Tunes.”

Sam Sifton on Lyon, which opened in the old Café de Bruxelles space on Greenwich Avenue, under the auspices of an owner of the late, lamented La Goulue.

The restaurant is warm and welcoming, already more a neighborhood draw than a publicist’s undertaking, with celebrity sightings limited to Michael Moore and a war reporter or two. You might see young professionals crushed into a corner, catching up (“You’re moving to Elkhart? Where is that, Illinois? Indiana?”) or literary people polishing their eyeglasses in pairs as they talk about art. No fewer than three tables one recent night were populated by women eating salad and talking about the economy, everyone slugging down wine.

Add the scent of Gauloises, a dog or two under the tables, and we might be down the street from the Hôtel de Ville, and not from poor, dark St. Vincent’s, waiting for its fate. Lyon is that close to soaring.

[snip]

Restaurants are central to the process by which nature becomes a form of culture. At their best they are where we go to experience, and celebrate, the transformation.

As Mr Sifton says, Lyon isn’t there yet, but we’ hope that management is listening.

Until last night, I hadn’t heard of Karen Owen and her PowerPoint presentation. Ms Owen, an undergraduate at Duke University, decided to treat thirteen college athletes with whom she had sex as “subjects” of a faux-sociological report — which is to say that she rated them with astringent candor. Having read about the presentation in Caitlin Flanagan’s aghast article in The Atlantic, I can see that there’s no need to continue beyond the first couple of slides. 

But the 42 slides of Owen’s report on her “horizontal academics” are so dense with narrative detail, bits of dialogue, descriptions of people and places, and reproduced text-message conversations that they are a chore to read. It’s as though two impulses are at war with one another: the desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way—marked by locker-room crudeness and PowerPoint efficiency—fighting against the womanly desire to luxuriate in the story of it all.

A chore to read at best. A Calvary, I should think, for her family. If nothing else, it confirms my ancient convinction that, classrooms aside, male and female students ought not to share the same campus. 

Sex education needs a serous re-think: the sexes need to be taught about one anotheer. It would appear the learning the mechanics of the thing is the least of the problem that faces young people. Boys in addition need to learn that gratifying their own desires, whatever these might be, is always less important than respecting the human independence of their partner(s). This principle is right up there with the prohibition of murder and the rules against stealing things. Which brings me to the other Atlantic article that I read last night, Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s pornography update, “Hard Core.” Vargas-Cooper grasps an aspect of sexuality that doesn’t, I think, get enough frank discussion; when it comes up, it’s tarted up as “role-playing.” I’m speaking of power, as in the exercise of — and the tremendous ambivalence that men feel in the face of a partner’s surrender. 

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.

Although Vargas-Cooper doesn’t seem terribly upset by her encounter with the “polite, educated fellow” — educated in what? — it made me sick that anyone would corrupt an intimate encounter by asking to inflict pain — to introduce an absolute distance. (I hope that you grasp the difference between wanting to make someone else uncomfortable — this fellow’s stated objective — and asking to “try something out” that, while causing some discomfort, might also afford the partner a kinky sexual satisfaction.) I’m not shocked by the desire, but the guy’s bad manners are astonishing. Not that there is anything about Vargas-Cooper’s report that likens him to a rapist. He seems to have remained “polite” in bed (his problem, perhaps?). It’s that hse seems to have believed that his partner could give him permission to make her uncomfortable. 

It is easy to hold up the stories told in the two Atlantic pieces against nostalgia for the good old days of respectability, which afforded a woman who chose to take advantage of it a great deal of protection from the predations of male sexuality. But that’s a mistake as well as a distraction. It’s a good thing that women can’t “fall” anymore — not even Karen Owen. The question isn’t who gets to have sex with whom. The question is what kind of sex is wrong for everybody. We seem to be on the same page about children and non-consensual sex — verboten. Perhaps those are the only workable general rules. But the idea that “sex is good full stop” is preposterously naive, and if the flower children of the Sixties may be forgiven for their ignorant excesses, no such innocence is available today. 

As an aside, I think that it’s worth thinking whether the uncorseting of the American libido had the side-effect of eliminating shame on the subject of income inequality.

David Leonhardt‘s overview of the “jobs slump” makes for dispiriting reasons, because describing the problem in economic terms infuses the discussion with helpless passivity. The root of the problem is social and political: the United States has become a country in which too many powerful people feel no less entitled to be rich than medieval aristocrats felt entitled to be privileged. Not only that, but too many ordinary Americans dream of becoming rich and powerful.

Policy makers could also help the unemployed by spreading economic pain more broadly among the population. I realize this idea may not sound so good at first. Who wants pain to spread? But the fact is that this downturn has concentrated its effects on a relatively narrow group of Americans.

In Germany and Canada, some companies and workers have averted layoffs by agreeing to cut everyone’s hours and, thus, pay. In this country, average wages for the employed have risen faster than inflation since 2007, which is highly unusual for a downturn. Yet unemployment remains terribly high, and almost half of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months. These are the people bearing the brunt of the downturn.

Germany’s job-sharing program — known as “Kurzarbeit,” or short work — has won praise from both conservative and liberal economists. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, has offered a bill that would encourage similar programs. So far, though, the White House has not pursued it aggressively. Perhaps Gene Sperling, the new director of the National Economic Council, can put it back on the agenda.

Kurzarbeit is a great idea, and it may take hold here, eventually — but probably not because it eases any pain.

We refer to American television audiences, deemed unready for a miniseries about the Kennedys that, like any miniseries, has a story to tell and grants itself artistic license to do so. Dave Itzkoff‘s report is probably about as clear as this murky business permits.

The announcement by History in December 2009 that it was planning to show “The Kennedys” was a major step for it into scripted programming. It came at a time when History, a cable channel owned by A&E Television Networks, was shedding its reputation for musty war documentaries in favor of red-blooded reality shows like “Ax Men” and “Ice Road Truckers.” The move was meant to bring History prestige, as well as to establish a connection to the “Kennedys” producer Joel Surnow, an Emmy Award-winning co-creator of the Fox series “24” and outspoken political conservative.

But on Jan. 7, History announced that it would not broadcast “The Kennedys” after all. It said, “After viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.” Starz, FX and Showtime also passed on the project. “The Kennedys,” produced by Muse Entertainment, a Canadian company, and Asylum Entertainment in the United States, is scheduled to be shown in the coming months in 30 countries, including Canada and Britain. DirecTV, a subscription satellite television service, has expressed interest in showing the mini-series in the United States but said on Monday that it had not yet seen it.

The cryptic statement from History seemed to reflect criticism that dogged the project for months, even before it started production. In February a group of historians organized by a liberal filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, issued a condemnation based on early drafts of scripts obtained by Mr. Greenwald. These historians said the scripts contained factual errors, fabrications and more than a dash of salacious innuendo. Among the critics was Theodore C. Sorensen, the longtime adviser and speechwriter to President Kennedy. (Mr. Sorensen died in October.)

This quibbling over degrees of trash is incredibly fatuous.

There were two stories in this morning’s Times that interested me even more when I sensed that there was a connection between them. The connection is not obvious, and I want to try to work it out here.

The first piece is David Brooks’s column about Amy Chua. Amy Chua is a lawyer of Chinese background who, in her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, describes her career as a very tough mom. Brooks’s “paradoxical” point is that she’s not tough at all; on the contrary, Chua is protecting her daughters from the tough cognitive tests that determine both success and happiness in life. This carries forward the thinking that Brooks outlined in his New Yorker essay last week, and underlines my conclusion that an educational model that takes the cognitive revolution into account will put much less emphasis on individual examinations than today’s best schools do. Chua, subscribing to the received wisdom that finds a high correlation between achievement and advancement, imposed upon her daughters a rigorous program of “practice makes perfect,” neither questioning the value of perfection nor assessing its cost. We agree witr Brooks that this is not very intelligent. 

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

The other piece is about Apple. Steve Jobs is ailing, and he’ll be taking another leave of absence from running the company. Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller report that the “deep bench” of leaders at Apple ought to insure its continued success. But they quote a couple of observers who aren’t so sure. One of them is David Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. 

“The company could not thrive if Steve didn’t have an extremely talented team around him,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied the technology industry for decades. “But you can’t replace Steve on some levels.” 

Mr. Yoffie and others said Mr. Jobs’s creativity, obsession with a product’s design and function, and management style, as well as the force of his personality, were unusual, not only in Silicon Valley, but also in American business. They said that it would take several people with different skills to fill Mr. Jobs’s shoes.

The reinvention of Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting stories in American business. Always a visionary as well as a gifted engineer, Mr Jobs appears to have lacked good people skills in his first shift at Apple’s helm. He was tossed out of his own company, and languished in the wilderness for over ten years. For the past fifteen years, he has shown himself to be the nucleus of a brilliantly creative team. That I call him the nucleus of the team rather than its leader is an indication of the connection that I see between the two stories. A leader is much easier to replace than a nucleus; it’s also much easier to measure the effectiveness of a leader. Leadership is just another individual skill that can be learned. By “nucleus,” I have something far more complex in mind: the center of a web of semi-conscious (or even unconscious) signals, suggestions, cues, and associations that bind Apple’s top engineers and marketers in a productive unit. Steve Jobs runs that web — again, I would argue, unconsciously. I have no idea what lessons he learned during his exile, but it is not necessary that becoming a more “understanding” leader was one of them. The only thing that Mr Jobs had to understand, at the end of the day, was how to pick compatible executives. (And this may be nothing more or less complicated than a matter of wearing clothes — although the heir-apparent, Timothy Cook, looks as if he’d be much more comfortable in a jacket and tie.) All he had to learn was how to be a more powerful nucleus, a more efficient reader and emitter of personal communications. Insofar as the result was to unleash the true power of Steve Jobs — and this does seem to be what happened — then it is very unlikely that Apple will continue on its course of staggeringly successful innovation. 

Continuing on that course may not be necessary for Apple to continue to be a successful enterprise — but that’s a matter for some other time. My point is that Apple’s success under Steve Jobs appears to have depended on the very skills that, in David Brooks’s view, Amy Chua has denied her daughters the pportunity to acquire. We certainly don’t know very much about teaching them.

Despite huge alterations in the window dressing, we see little difference between Ashley Parker‘s account of the Washington feed warriors who get up at four in the morning to keep their powerful bosses informed and the sociology of courtly life outlined decades ago by Norbert Elias.

Mr. Maldonado, 26, is one of the dozens of young aides throughout the city who rise before dawn to pore over the news to synthesize it, summarize it and spin it, so their bosses start the day well-prepared. Washington is a city that traffics in information, and as these 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what — and when they know it — can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

“Information is the capital market of Washington, so you know something that other people don’t know and you know something earlier than other people know it is a formulation for increasing your status and power,” said David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “So any edge you can use to get stuff faster, earlier, better or exclusively is very important.”

For Mr. Maldonado, who said that “the information wars are won before work,” that means rising early to browse all of the major newspapers, new polling data, ideological Web sites and dozens of news alerts needed to equip his bosses with the best, most up-to-date nuggets.

We wish that we’d known about “713 to 212,” a jazz festival centered on musicians who studied at Houston’s High School for Performing and Visual Arts; we didn’t even know that the 92nd Street Y has a Tribeca branch!

Beginning at that time Jason Moran, the pianist from Houston’s Third Ward who’d moved to New York in 1993, was getting around all kinds of normative ideas about jazz style and repertory, but he didn’t isolate himself from the jazz tradition. He swiped inspiration from all over the place — visual art, film, the music of spoken conversation in foreign languages — but also played with Greg Osby and Sam Rivers and Charles Lloyd and Wayne Shorter. He was having it both ways. If asked what formed him, he’d talk about his teachers, and that would lead him to talk about Houston and the school he attended for three years there: the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Then, in a steady rollout, you noticed other young musicians from that same school, most of whom had studied with the same teacher, Robert Morgan. The drummers Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Chris Dave and Jamire Williams. The trombonist Corey King. The guitarist Mike Moreno. The pianists Robert Glasper and Helen Sung. The trumpeters Leron Thomas and Brandon Lee. The bassists Burniss Earl Travis and Mark Kelley and Marcos Varela. If you looked a little beyond jazz, you saw Josh Mease and Alan Hampton, putting crazy chord sequences into something like folk-pop, and Bryan-Michael Cox, who was writing and producing for R&B stars.

All but one of them came to the 92nd Street Y’s TriBeCa branch on Friday and Saturday nights for an event organized by Mr. Moran called “713 to 212: Houstonians in NYC.” (The exception was Mr. Cox, scheduled to participate but unable to make it out of Atlanta in time.) Dr. Morgan, affable and energetic, was there too, talking in a preconcert panel discussion on Saturday. So were some Houston players of older generations: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the trumpeter Ku-umba Frank Lacy, the drummer Michael Carvin, the trumpeter Tex Allen, the guitarist Melvin Sparks.

Our usual source for information of this kind has been very busy lately. For just over a year, in fact.

Lordy, am I tired. If I weren’t so tired, I’d finish that there sentence with an exclamation point, but I’m not up to the shifting. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning until eleven. I spent most of the afternoon reorganizing a closet. There are freshwater fish with more interesting things on their minds. I read Tony Judt’s piece about trains in the New York Review of Books. It was exactly congruent with my thoughts about the future of transportation; when I think of the future of this country, I see a solitary state taking shape along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line. As I say, though, I’m much too tired to develop these thoughts.

If we were not going to dinner with a friend, I would try to take Kathleen to see True Grit this evening. That’s why I saw it on Friday, and not something else: I was vetting the violence, which, in the event, turns out to be nowhere near as great as we had been led to believe. (It’s not as violent as Fargo, for example — probably because you expect more shootouts in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas than you do in contemporary Minneapolis.) Such violence as there is is usually clearly foreseeable, giving Kathleen time to cover her eyes. (I covered mine during that scene with the rattlesnake; it did no good at all.) As I say, though, we have a date to do something else.

If I weren’t so tired, I would fast-forward through the Brahms piano sonata that is playing right now. I never know which is which; they all sound the same. Ponderous. You can see why pianos in Brahms’s day had to have such stout legs: all that pounding! I thought that repeated exposure on one or two of the playlists would teach me to love them, but it’s not happening. As I say, though, I’m too tired to think of anything else to play.

Pray that I don’t fall into my soup.

 

 

Dr Martin Luther King was an honorary New Yorker.

In the summer of 1964, after the shooting of a 15-year-old by an off-duty police officer touched off riots in Harlem, Mayor Robert F. Wagner invited Dr. King to New York on a peace mission (one made slightly more complicated by the fact that some black leaders resented that the mayor had invited Dr. King without consulting them). Later that year, one week after he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Dr. King was proclaimed an honorary New Yorker by the mayor who presented him with the Medallion of Honor at City Hall.

In a speech (see below) found in the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at La Guardia Community College by Steven A. Levine, the coordinator for educational programs, the mayor recalled their conversation the summer before at Gracie Mansion.

“During the most explosive moments of the civil rights revolution in this country, while the urge to violence seemed to be running like a fever through the land, the voice of Martin Luther King sounded clearly above the turmoil of fear and fright — saying that violence, vandalism and destruction were not the way,” Mr. Wagner recalled.

“But when the vital questions were asked, ‘What is the way?’ and ‘Where is the way?’ and ‘What are the means and the ends of the way?’ he knew the answers and spoke the answers.”

Wendy Pollak-Reilly

Because it was a lot easier for Ryan’s family to gather a the home of his uncle, just across the Delaware River in Easton, Pennsylvania, Will’s first birthday party was held there, and not in town. The pictures taken by Wendy Pollak-Reilly, from one of which the image above is a crop, make it clear that a good time was had by all. Will climbed the flight of stairs seven or eight times, quite unaided on most ascents.

But enough about him — lest I fall into besotted mode and lose interest in talking about anything else. When Ryan extended the invitation to the party, I asked how we would get there. That sounds confrontational, but I was thinking — panicking — out loud. I knew what the answer was: “by car.” But I don’t drive anymore; with my unmoving spine, I can’t be a safe driver. As for Kathleen — she hasn’t drive a quarter of the trip’s mileage in her entire life. So when Ryan said, “By car,” I asked if Fossil and XIV would be invited. He said that they would be, and that cleared everything up. Fossil loves to drive. As soon as he heard that the future of our long friendship depended upon his giving up an entire Saturday to ferry me and my wife to a non-adjecent state, not to mention renting the car, I knew that he would jump at the chance.

Fossil zipped an email to our host asking for directions — the two men were good buddies, having made back-to-back speeches at Will’s parents’ wedding — and got one of those MapQuest lists of turns that traffic in fractional mileages. Turn left in 0.7 miles, that sort of thing. (There is much to be learned about computer-generated instructions.) I asked Fossil to forward the directions to me, so that I could see where we were going on Google Maps. I decided that there was a better way of getting where we were going — and a good thing, too, because, even though I was mistaken about “better,” one of the crucial MapQuest instructions read “near left” instead of “far right.” We whizzed by the intended exit in a distant lane. This wasn’t your garden-variety Interstate exit. There would be no doubling back from the next exit. We had just crossed the Delaware River and missed the turn into the old part of Easton. We were hurtling along US 22, following the snaking trail of a creek. Happily, I knew where the next exit was and where to go from there. More or less.

I didn’t have my “better” route with me, though. I hadn’t printed a copy of the map, or written down a list of roads. (I had my iPad, but in my experience, Google Maps overwhelms the iPad.) All I had was my recollection of where the house stood in relation to the Easton, the Delaware River, and the next exit. So, we climbed Hackett Avenue, and proceeded on Greenhill and Edgewood. (I had no idea if these streets would get us where we were going, but they seemed to lead in the right direction.) When Edgewood ended in Bushkill Drive, I couldn’t decide which way to take, but I was tickled to discover later that it wouldn’t have mattered. I went for left, then changed my mind. We turned right. We took the next left, at Mitman Road, and climbed another hill. At the corner of Arndt Road, I told  Fossil to take another right. If I’d told him to go straight ahead, we’d have reached our destination a minute or two sooner, but my sense that the house stood to the east of the intersection of Arndt and Mitman was correct — another tickle. At Indian Trail, I thought that we’d gone far enough (correct again), so we turned left onto that, and in two blocks, lo and behold, the very street that I was looking for, Old Mill Road. A couple of turns later, and we were parking.

So instead of boasting about my grandson, I’ve trumpeted my talents as a bushwhacker. I could never have been a cartographer; I gave surveying a try in Boy Scouts and was bored to sobs by it. But I could look at maps all day, and with Google Maps, with its satellite photographs showing actual houses and trees, I get a good sense (as I discovered yesterday) of distances.

I have to say that, by the time we turned into Indian Trail, my hope was sinking fast, and I was preparing myself for a humiliating cell phone call. Kathleen never doubted for a moment that I wouldn’t need to make it. “I’ve been watching you pull these things out of a hat for over thirty years.”

PS: Aside from one guy chopping wood in his driveway — a long way from where we were going, it turned out — there was no one to stop and ask. Driving home, we were able to follow the directions that Fossil had been given — in reverse. We got a nice look at Lafayette College, which Fossil almost attended.  

Matins

¶ Tyler Cowen ticks off a list of the factors that make France a “highly dynamic and performative economy.” Item Number One: “ The French elite work very hard and are educated very well.” We could not agree more heartily, and if we have any purpose in the world it’s to prick members of the American/Anglophone elite into recognizing the importance of a rigorous education and the value of cooperative industry. Tyler also mentions what he terms “the prevailing norms of status competition” twice. We turn this around anc call it “the importance of setting a good example.” We are inclined to agree that the choice of acceptable examples in France is regrettablylimited; we believe that living happily, generously, and attentively can be attained in many different ways.  ¶ Don’t miss Jeremy Waldron on the political virtues of hypocrisy, at the LRB. The piece is behind the paywall, unfortunately, but that’s a good reason for buying a copy of the Review or, better, suscribing. In our view, it’s one of the three indispensable magazines, the others being The New Yorker and the NYRB. We’ll have more to say about hypocrisy during the week.

Lauds

¶ The all-too-familiar conflict of artists and nationalists is simmering in Hungary. Conductor Adam Fischer (whose recordings of Haydn symphonies ought to be in your library) alerted journalists in Brussels to the seriousness of intrusions by the current conservative government into artistic affairs, which extends to tolerating anti-Semitic atttacks on pianist András Schiff, who has announced that, as a “persona non grata” in Hungary, he has no plans to revisit his native land, much less perform there. The great European experiment that remains to be undertaken is the decoupling of nationalist impulses from the exercise off sovereignty; short of that, “Europeanism” is just a lot of well-intentioned chatter. (Independent; via ArtsJournal)

Prime

¶ A tale of two temperaments: Floyd Norris’s scolding reproof to Charles Schwab & Company boils into outrage in Felix Salmon’s pages. Mr Norris has a reluctance, not shared by Mr Salmon, to accuse Schwab of lying, but it’s hard to know what else to call the fine-print borne mendacity of Schwab’s sales literature. No doubt that good people at Schwab expected, just like everybody else, that the market would continue to boom, and that nobody would mind; just as bankers confected huge volumes of mortgage-backed securities in order to minimize the appearance of risk, so Schwab sliced and diced the meaning of “maturity.” ¶ At The Baseline Scenario, Simon Johnson shows that Goldman, Sachs is far more suave at “misdirection.” Then he goes on to point out the increasingly apolitical cast of regulators and economist who argue that banks too big to fail are too big to be permitted.

Tierce

¶ At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait notes that Salon has removed “an antivax hit piece” from its archives. Better, he suggests — and we couldn’t agree more — to leave the story in the archives, embedding it with links to stories that got the the anti-vaccination fraudernaut right from the get-go. ¶ We thought of Adam Fenwick-Symes when we read that European Commission tax officials have declared that lighting installations by Dan Flavin and Bill Viola’s video installations ought to be taxed as appliances instead of as art. This is molto dumb! Josh Rothman reminds us that the Customs Court here in New York was persuaded to reach the opposite conclusion vis-à-vis Brancusi’s Bird in Flight.

Sext

¶ Rebecca O’Neal writes about her hobby: requesting samples from consumer-products manufacturers.

In a good week, I’ll get over a half dozen samples: diapers and baby formula for my niece, magazine subscriptions, pads and tampons (!), laundry detergent, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, perfume, post-it notes, pens, vitamins, calendars, mouse pads, ziploc and trash bags, dog food, medicine, human food (mostly grains and instant beverages: health food bars, cereal, tea, coffee, protein supplements), calendars, subscriptions to Rouge, Ebony, and American Baby magazines, toothpaste, stickers, key chains, bumper stickers, condoms, and lube — pretty much all the things a single gal could need. And plenty of things I have no use for: a year’s subscription to MotorBoating and Dime magazines, anti-ball chafing salves, and, of course, the Dependsâ„¢

If you want to get things faster, she advises, write to retailers instead of manufacturers. Procter & Gamble, not surprisingly, has a subscription setup, so that you have to ask only once! Ms O’Neal recycles most of her loot among family, friends, and a neighborhood nursing home. If we ever decide to stop buying books but miss receiving all the packages, we’re going to remember this pastime! (The Awl) ¶ The greatest thing about our friend Eric (or so we feel right now) is that he will come out and admit to having wanted to change his name to “Eric Sèvres-Babylone” when he first passed through that station of the Métro. We’re so glad to hear that he had a good time in Paris, se débrouillant with the best of them. (Sore Afraid)

Nones

¶ In the Times Magazine, Paul Krugman prognosticates about the Euro, which is going to make life very difficult for the overheated peripheral economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, and also for Spain and Italy, as they attempt attempt deflation as to prices and wages without, however, being able to adjust their Euro-denominated indebtedness. Mr Krugman outlines four options: toughing it out; debt repudiation; withdrawal from the Euro Zone; and, least likely of all, “revived Europeanism.” We confess to being cranks on the subject; we believe that each local economy ought to have its own currency. (An idea that we got from Jane Jacobs.) We’re also intrigued by the parallel currencies in Renaissance Florence that Tim Parks describes in Medici Money. One way or another, local economies and the global economy must be connected by adjustable gears, not by bolts.

Vespers

¶ Once you’ve heard Gary Shteyngart read, you see him for the entertainer that he is and claims to want to be; reading him on the page is a diminished experience of his mordant critique of American despair. (His word for that despair is “complacency,” the complacency that ensues when you no longer care about anything anymore.) We don’t want to suggest that this dependence, for full effect, on soundtrack makes Shteyngart a less literary figure, but we don’t know what else to suggest, either. His interview with Alex Shephard at Full Stop is a delight. (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ In a grand long read at the Guardian, Laura Miller singles Shteyngart out (along with Jennifer Egan) as a rare fictionist who writes about the impact of the Internet on daily life.

Compline

¶ Kyle Minor meditates on the inappropriateness of politically-correct controls in literary life. He’s thinking, of course, of the expunging of the “N-word” from a new edition of Huckleberry Finn — a misguided but harmless editorial decision, in our view, at least so long as there are accurate edition of Mark Twain’s strange book. The simple truth, as Kyle clearly sees, is that people think of themselves in politically incorrect ways that can’t be captured without recourse to the proscribed vocabulary. But what’s needed is a signpost at the gate of literature that warns readers not that they might encounter offensive language but that they’re joining a community of human beings, many dead and many yet to be born, who test life against the imagination (their own and others’), and that they’ll be expected to keep their voices down until they understand that project. ¶ Elsewhere at  HTMLGiant, Kyle interviews Elizabeth Harris, a translator from the Italian whose authors, Giulio Mozzi and Marco Candida, sound worth getting to know; and writes movingly of the comfort to be drawn in hard times from uncomfortable books:

The contemplation of death is for some people this great terror, and the best reading is often full of the contemplation of death, and so they stave off the contemplation of death by choosing the lostness of a contemplation of the contemplation of death.

Have a Look

¶ “So You Found Something Cool on the Internet…” (Rosscott, Inc; via Brain Pickings)

¶ Mieke Meijer @ The Best Part.

¶ La Tour Montparnasse. (Mnémoglyphes)

Noted

¶ Yves Smith’s “must-read” list, and why she doesn’t think much of NPR’s. (Naked Capitalism)

“Please Don’t Misinterpret My Inflammatory Remarks.” (The Bygone Bureau)

On our next visit to the Bay Area, we hope to have the time for a trip to Mountain View, to see the Computer History Museum there. Although, if we wait long enoujgh, we may not have to go father than Palo Alto, where, we foresee, a Frank Gehry building will house the collection.

“We are living through the time of transition, from there being no computers anywhere to there being computers in everything that we touch,” said Leonard J. Shustek, a venture capitalist and chairman of the museum’s board. “We owe it to the future to preserve the artifacts and stories of how that happened.”

Housed for two decades in Boston, the immense and growing collection of hardware, tech trinkets and ephemera was moved in 1996 to Silicon Valley, where it occupied various makeshift locations and served as a go-to place for technology insiders to reminisce about the heady, built-in-the-garage computer era.

Much of that history is reflected in a new exhibit, “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing,” which includes items like the first disk drive, I.B.M.’s hulking Ramac from 1956, Apple’s early personal computers like the Apple II, robots, the first arcade video games, a stack of Google’s earliest computer servers and even a table-size computer sold by Neiman Marcus in 1969 to store recipes for busy housewives.

When? When was the last time I went to a movie on Friday? I don’t remember. But I went today. I saw True Grit, across the street. It’s a big beautiful movie, grander (visually) than any other Coen Brothers movie that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen ’em all, with the exception of No Country For Old Men). Hailee Steinfeld, who just turned fourteen, is amazingly composed and convincingly old-fashioned. In fact, the movie captures the pioneer rigor that inspired women to avoid anything like a casual speaking manner, but Ms Steinfeld’s air of knowing how she is going to finish every sentence before she begins to speak it is one of the movie’s great strengths. She brings all the gravitas that her costar, Jeff Bridges, always leaves behind in his trailer. The interesting thing about Matt Damon’s appearance in the film is that he plays the part of a supporting actor extraordinarily well. Anybody else, and you’d be saying, “How nice to see this gifted actor in a meaty role. Maybe now he’ll be famous.” Josh Brolin is extremely interesting, too, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to be saying similar things about his performance. The part is not quite big enough for that kind of praise, and Mr Brolin is such a convincing bad guy – a modern-day narcissist in long underwear — that you just can’t wish him well.

Then I came home. Usually, after a movie, I go somewhere for lunch, but today was unusual: I was going to meet a friend from my undergraduate days at Notre Dame, whom I hadn’t seen since, in the middle of the afternoon, and I had no appetite. I stopped in for a demi-baguette at the Food Emporium, thinking that I’d make myself a hero and eat a bit of it, saving the rest, but the only loaf that they had, which I bought, turned out to be whole wheat. I might eat whole wheat bread by itself, but never, ever in a sandwich. So I freshened up a bit and got ready to head out. Then I received a very nice email.

I’d love to say more about it, but it seems that do so would be clumsily indiscreet. I wrote to someone who is related to someone whose letters I’ve been reading. Acute readers will have no trouble figuring out whom I talking about when I say that, when you Google this gentleman (the relative, not the letter-writer), you get a lot of returns that have nothing to do with him at all, in which his name is interrupted by a semicolon, because his father, who was a well-known midcentury author (but not  the writer of the letters that I’ve been reading) wrote a book about one of the best-known of all American writers. So much for clues.

I wrote because I was dying to know more about my letter-writer — actually dying, it felt. The book in which the letters appeared said nothing about the writer, which galled me. So I wrote to the writer’s relative, and the writer’s relative wrote back to me, and it was both very sweet and deliriously futuristic, because that’s the world that we live in now and I sometimes can’t believe it: Like what you’re reading? Google! The best part: it turns out that the relative and I share a great love of the music of Emmanuel Chabrier. How wonderful is that? You write to someone about somebody else and find out that you have this great common interest with the someone! That said, I’d spent the morning anxiously worrying that I’d never hear back, or that the response would be unpleasant. When you write to someone whom you don’t know, and who of course doesn’t know you, you open yourself up to vastnesses of feeling foolish.

As I didn’t, in the event, feel foolish, I whistled my way out the door and set out for the border between Chelsea and Herald Square, where my classmate was staying. I got there first by minutes, feeling the whole time that I had ventured on foreign travel. My friend would be astonished when I told him that I never left Manhattan Island during the whole of 2009; the truth is that, aside from unadventurous forays to MTC’s theatres and Carnegie Hall, I spend no time whatsoever on the West Side of the island. It might as well be in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, and it felt like that rather when the time came to head home. It was dark; it was rush hour. There were so many people on the sidewalk, and I had no clear idea of where the subway stairs would be. It was not unpleasant; I didn’t come away thinking, let’s not do that again anytime soon. But it was foreign. In a city so densely packed with millions of people, it is possible to travel far in the space of a few miles.

It was very, very good to see my old friend, who is, very simply, a special person. I thought so when we were in school and I think so today. He’s warm, deliberate, richly intelligent, sweet, and utterly unaffected. I always felt like a pompous ass in comparison. I was a pompous ass absolutely, but I felt it most when Philip was around; and yet I could never hold that unpleasantness against him. This afternoon, I felt like something of a luftmensh when it came time to explain what I do with my life to Philip’s lovely wife and lovely daughter, but I’m glad to have met them, and I look forward to seeing Philip again very soon, because it is grounding to spend time in his company.

I hasten to add that Philip and I didn’t keep up after college, that it was a note from him, triggered by something that he’d run into on the Internet a few years ago (this was before Facebook, I think, but perhaps I’m wrong), that brought us together again. Just as it brings me to you.