Anthony Lane - "The Intoxicating History of Gin"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-intoxicating-history-of-gin

Luis Buñuel suggested holding the bottle of vermouth in a shaft of sunlight, so that it would irradiate the gin without touching it: a wicked twist on the doctrine of the Incarnation. Drier still, if spiked with apocrypha, is Noël Coward’s definition: “A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”

A novice who dives into gin, or simply dips a toe, will soon notice the designation “London Gin” or “London Dry Gin” on many bottles, and will, understandably, assume that the stuff was made in London. Not so. The word “London” denotes a method, and you won’t need me to remind you that Annex II, Section 22, Subsection (a)(i) of Regulation (EC) No 110/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council ordains that London Gin be “obtained exclusively from ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin, with a maximum methanol content of 5 grams per hectolitre of 100% vol. alcohol, whose flavour is introduced exclusively through the re-distillation in traditional stills of ethyl alcohol in the presence of all the natural plant materials used.” In other words, mix your bits together at the start and toss ’em all in the pot. Late arrivals will not be admitted.

The craze didn’t erupt from nowhere. The British have been imbibing gin, or some approximation of it, for hundreds of years. Seventeenth-century British soldiers, fighting in the Low Countries, showed a sweet tooth for the local rotgut, and the word “gin” derives from jenever, the Dutch for juniper. (Just to complicate matters, genever—a respectable spirit, sweeter and warmer than regular gin, and ideal for fending off the northern chill—is still widely drunk in the Netherlands.) Juniper had long been embraced as a curative, especially against the plague (it didn’t work), and that benign reputation lingered. We don’t know exactly what went into the “strong water made of juniper” that the diarist Samuel Pepys knocked back on October 10, 1663, but it did the trick and, he said, allayed his constipation.

No law on booze will ever surpass the ingenuity of those determined to break it, as any student of Prohibition is aware, and as any reader of “The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Captain Dudley Bradstreet,” published in 1755, can confirm. The author was on the make during the later Gin Acts, and, having studied them for loopholes, displayed both wit and élan in staying, if only by a whisker, within the rules. He realized, for instance, that the authorities, who by now were clamping down on distillation in the home, had no right to break into the home to do the clamping. So he “purchased in Moorfields the Sign of a Cat, and had it nailed to a Street Window; I then caused a Leaden Pipe, the small End out about an Inch, to be placed under the Paw of the Cat; the End that was within had a Funnel to it.” At night, Bradstreet entered the house, shut the door, and waited:

    At last I heard the Chink of Money, and a comfortable Voice say, “Puss, give me two Pennyworth of Gin.” I instantly put my Mouth to the Tube, and bid them receive it from the Pipe under her Paw, and then measured and poured it into the Funnel, from whence they soon received it.

try Samuel Johnson, whose brisk Tory tolerance had an answer for most conundrums. Asked why it was worth giving halfpence to beggars, since they would “only lay it out in gin or tobacco,” he asked, in return, “Why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?” He continued:

    It is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer.

Elizabeth Kolbert - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term "myside bias." Humans, they point out, aren't randomly credulous. Presented with someone else's argument, we're quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we're blind about are our own.

[...]

This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren't the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Anthony Gottlieb - "The Man Who Thought Too Fast"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/the-man-who-thought-too-fast

 

 Ramsey Theory, which analyzes order and disorder. (As an Oxord methematician, Martin Gould, has explained, Ramsey theory tells us, for instance, that among any six users of Facebook there will always be either a trio of mutual friends or a trio in which none are friends.)

Lauren Collins - "The Hottest Restaurant in France Is an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/les-grands-buffets-and-the-art-of-all-you-can-eat  

The writer André Borel d’Hauterive once attempted a taxonomy of eaters: the gastronome (appreciates good food and wine and partakes reasonably), the gourmand (prefers quantity to quality), the friand (has a sweet tooth), the goinfre (eats enthusiastically to excess), the ventru (“makes a God of his stomach”), the glouton (dessert comes and he has no idea what he’s eaten), the goulu (dessert comes and he has no idea how much he’s eaten).

Leslie Jamison - "Why Everybody Feels Like They're Faking It"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome

imposter syndrome, the people who first coined the idea/phrase

[Jody-Ann] Burey, who was born in Jamaica, didn't feel like an imposter; she felt enraged by the systems that had been built to disenfranchise her. She also didn't experience any yearning to belong, to inhabit certain spaces of power. "White women want to access power, they want to sit at the table," she told me. "Black women say, this table is rotten, this table is hurting everyone."

Every time [Suzanne]Imes hears the phrase "imposter syndrome," she told me, it lodges in her gut. It's technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is "an experience rather than a pathology," and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it. Their concept was never meant to be a solution for inequality and prejudice in the workplace–a task for which it would necessarily prove insufficient.

The psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, in her book "Animal Joy," explains imposter syndrome by drawing on D. W. Winnicott's concepts of "false self" and "true self." She sees the anxiety as stemming from "a False Self that is so fortified by layers of compliant behavior that is loses contact with the raw impulses and expressions that characterize the True Self." Attempts to prevent the discovery of one's "true self" end up compounding the belief that this self, were it ever discovered, would be rejected and dismissed.

Paul Bloom - "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/perverse-incentives

Wegner proposed that such attempts at thought suppression [trying not to think about racial stereotypes makes people more conscious of them, sometimes to the point of distraction and anxiety] involve two distinct mental processes. First, there's a conscious and effortful system that works to create the desired outcome–for example, by finding something to think about that's not a white bear. Second, there's a part of the mind that remains alert to what's being suppressed–it scans for white-bear thoughts so that they can be shooed away. Sometimes, especially if we are tired or distracted or inebriated, the workings of the second system seep into consciousness. Now you're thinking of, and maybe talking about, just what you were trying to avoid thinking about.

And there might be something respectable about perversity done right. The righteously perverse individual appreciates the value of rationality, morality, and the good life–and then, chafing against them, chooses another path. Evolutionairy biologists sometimes speak of "hopeful monsters": although evolution typically occurs when tiny changes in phenotypes lead to greater reproductive success, hopeful monsters, which are the products of macromutations, make huge leaps through evolutionary space. Such leaps, theorists say, would be almost certain to fail–but, theoretically, could spawn new lineages. The standard procedure for a rational decision-maker is to consider the alternatives and settle on the option that has the highest probability of maximizing whatever it is that one wants to mazimize, all the while trying to avoid pitfalls, such as myopia, weakness of will, whishful thinking, fear, and overconfidence. But what if you sometimes choose to behav erratically, unpredictably? A small dose of perversity might have its benefits. On an organizational level, for instance, it makes sense for a granting institution to spend its money on the proposals that its experts think are best. And yet it could also make esense, simulatenously, to allocate some of the money by lottery–or even to put aside some small fund for the proposals that the experts think are the worst.

Anthony Lane - "Shock and Aftershocks of the Waste Land"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

The shocks have triggered aftershocks, and readers of Eliot are trapped in the quake. Escape is useless:

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

I happen to think, for what it's worth, that these lines, which come toward the end of "The Waste Land," are the greatest that Eliot ever wrote. They cast a shadow of a doubt over everything that we believe about ourselves, at different stages of our lives; over the stories of ourselves that we tell to other people; and over what they tell of us in turn. As always with Eliot, abstraction is offset by the taut particularity of physical things: the spider, the wax seals, and the shuddering blood, concluding in the long and mournful double "o" of "rooms." And the word "surrender" could be applied to so many daring souls: a lover at the instant of ecstasy, a religious devotee, a hounded warrior, a corruptible politician, a wooer who hastens, like Eliot, into a proposal of marriage, or a Dostoyevskian gambler, with the family jewels in his pocket. All of them will face that overwhelming question: "What have we given?" It is something that each of us must ask, on our deathbeds, though nobody wants to die in shame.

Bambi was more gruesome than I'd realized

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/bambi-is-even-bleaker-than-you-thought

Amazing article about the original book about Bambi, how it was harsh. How its author, Felix Salten, is better known for writing basically child pornography. It's about trusting no one, being independent and that's all there is to life.

The book is at its best when it revels in rather than pretends to resolve the mystery of existence. At one point, Bambi passes by some midges who are discussing a June bug. "How long will he live?" the young ones ask. "Forever, almost," their elders answer. "They see the sun thirty or forty times." Elsewhere, a brief chapter records the final conversation of a pair of oak leaves clinging to a branch at the end of autumn. They gripe about the wind and the cold, mourn their fallen peers, and try to understand what is about to happen to them. "Why must we fall?" one asks. The other doesn't now, but has questions of its own: "Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we're down there?" The conversation tacks back and forth from the intimate to the existential. The two leaves worry about which of them will fall first; one of them, gone "yellow and ugly," reassures the other that is has barely changed at all. The response, just before the inevitable end, is startlingly moving: "You've always been so kind to me. I'm just beginning to understand how kind you are." That is the opposite of a paean to individualism: a belated but tender recognition of how much we mean to one another

Perhaps the most telling exchange in the book occurs, during that difficult winter, between Bambi's mother and his aunt. "It's hard to believe that it will ever be better," his mother says. His aunt responds, "It's hard to believe that it was ever any better."

Peter Schjeldahl - "77 sunset me"

poet and art critic. Wonderful essay in the New Yorker of 2019-12-23, basically a small autobiography, although he described failing writing one.

Lawrence Wrigth - "Crossroads" (the New Yorker, July 20, 2020)

Before retreating from Caffa, the Tartar general, Khan Jani Beg, ordered the diseased bodies of dead warriors catapulted over the city walls, in one of the first instances of biological warfare. Panicked citizens took to boats [...] A dozen ships made it to Sciliy, in October, 1347.

Sicilians were appalled to find on their shores boats with dead men still at their oars. Other sailors, dead or barely alive, were in their bunks, covered with foul-smelling sores. The horrified Sicilians drove the ships back to sea, but it was too late. Rats and fleas, the carriers of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the [black] plague, quickly infested the port of Messina. By January, Italy was engulfed. Ships arriving in the Venetian vassal sstate of Ragusa - present-day Dubrovnik - were required to sit at anchor for quaranta giorni, or forty days, which is where the term "quarantine" comes from.

Ingei Chen - "The Neurons That Tell Time"

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-neurons-that-tell-time


Speaking with Buzsáki, I found myself wondering what my brain was actually sensing when I seem to feel time flowing, second by second, minute by minute. "It has to be measuring something else, such as a change or speed or acceleration, for which we do have sensors," Buzsáki told me. If that's the case, then "time" isn't an absolute thing that our brains can "track" or "measure"; it's more like an organizational system for making sense of change in the world around us and coördinating our lives.

"Of course time is change," Edvard Moser agreed. Another way to describe his lab's analyses of the L.E.C. would be to say that it uncovered changing sequences of activity during episodes of experience. "We call it 'episodic time' to emphasize that this is not 'clock time,' " he said.

Dana Spiotta - "Jelly and Jack"

A woman uses the telephone to call semi strangers (friends of her friends) and, slowly connecting more and more to them, or rather, making them connect more and more to her, feels herself beautiful while on the phone, forgets her middle aged, overweight body, feels loved and wanted without every really lying (too much).

Amazing story telling. The mix of her thoughts, her wishes and desires, and the actual conversations, is amazing.

Sam Lipsyte - "Time travel - package tour"

Amazing short text, one of the four or five, and by far the best of them, on the idea of time travel. Funny, ironic, and personal in a simple direct way.

The New Yorker, June 8 & 15

Roberto Bolaño - "Labyrinth"

Short story revolving around the people in a photograph. Characteristic Bolaño writing, very matter-of-factly.

I realize it is impressive to knit together such a story from a mere photograph, but again, just like "2666" (still unfinished) it is a long summing up of activities with hints of people's feelings.

Though they don't need to be written down word by word, the feelings and emotions of the characters are too... shallow? no. too simple? to me. I do not see any change in character and I cannot really care for the story, its plot or its mood.

Margaret Atwood - "Stone Mattress"

Wonderful short about a woman in the autumn of her life who suddenly gets the chance to revenge herself on the guy who raped her after promnight while on a cruise to the Arctic Seas.

That rape, sent away from the small town, slowly working herself up, in a way was the beginning of the strong woman she would become to be, thereby making her rapist indirectly his own murderer.

Really good. Started to analyze it.