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Last Laugh
… dusk. He grunted, as if the other driver’s conduct were not worth commenting on.
The blue car moved still closer. It appeared to be about two feet from the silver car. Both cars were going around 65 miles an hour. The speed limit was 75.
“Just look at that!” I exclaimed.
How many cars …
Woman in a Red Raincoat
… I was sorry. I am sorry.” That would stop her in her tracks.
Stopping people in their tracks is not a laudable goal. But a person who feels misunderstood or ill-judged, and who has come out badly in the first round, might be forgiven for harboring a fantasy of the perfect gambit in a …
The Next New Thing
… little interest in traditional/classical architecture. Never mind that this approach accounts for countless private residences nationwide, as well as academic buildings, public libraries, concert halls, a federal courthouse, and a presidential library. One building that should have penetrated the media vacuum is 15 Central Park West, a luxury apartment building in Manhattan whose record …
Read MoreJane Skafte
… fronds in Florida, for example, are often reduced to cliché designs on beach towels and swimsuits, but Skafte prefers to zoom in on the negative shapes between the leaves. Ultimately, she says, she wants her work to conjure an aesthetic that “calms people rather than alerts them to something. I want people to feel peaceful.”
Read MoreThe Scales
… to reconcile. Poirot lets both husband and wife suffer uncertainty, fear, and inconvenience in order to bring them together again. It is a happy moment when the freed prisoner rushes into the room and gathers his wife into his arms. The reader can sigh with pleasure for the overjoyed couple, and smile indulgently at the …
Read MoreJust When You Thought It Wasn’t Safe …
… Royal Life Saving Society, had introduced the first mass teaching method, at the Detroit YMCA. Departing from the conventional breaststroke, which was difficult for fledgling swimmers to coordinate, Corsan opted to teach the crawl stroke and flutter kick, which he could do on land with large cohorts of children before transitioning them to the …
Read MoreImperfecta
… enhancement”—condoning the former, condemning the latter—but the distinction is arguably flimsy. As it becomes ever easier to manipulate genes to our liking, how will we feel about genetic characteristics that fall short of affliction, such as lack of athleticism, but nevertheless deny certain advantages to those who inherit them? What about atypicalities, such …
Read MoreConsummated in Exile
… claim—that only “free societies” produce great art—was the fundamental cultural premise of the CIA, State Department, and White House. (In my book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and the Cultural Cold War, I dub this counterfactual Cold War doctrine the “propaganda of freedom.”)
Nabokov’s favorite case in point was Dmitri …
Survival Situation
… be credited to a team of biochemists from Cardiff and a gastrointestinal pathologist and a historian of science from Leeds.” But his irritable dismissal of other answers feels like attending grand rounds with a celebrated expert who only skimmed the chart.
Darwin’s other trial wasn’t a trial at all. On that crucial summer …
Camouflage
Dressed up in the clothes of the woman whose flat she is staying in, the narrator of Tessa Hadley’s short story “Experience” feels she is in disguise, and this makes it easy for her to behave uncharacteristically. She is carefree and flirtatious, as if she were playing a part. Lee Chang-Dong’s point …
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