The 6th Floor Blog: How to Read Like a Staff Writer Who Writes About Everything

Susan Dominus recently wrote for the magazine about dieting in France, a mysterious case of twitching teens and the woman who took the fall for JPMorgan Chase.

Book I'm reading now:

I couldn't bring myself to read Benjamin Anastas's "Too Good To Be True," a memoir about a New York author's descent into debt and destruction (too harrowing for this writer); but the reviews of his writing were so good, I downloaded his first novel, "An Underachiever's Diary," and have been loving pretty much every word. The book is told from the dyspeptic perspective of a twin long considered his brother's inferior, subject matter inherently fascinating to me as the mother of twin boys; but I think even if that were not the case, I would be equally charmed by his voice — his pitch-perfect recollections of '70s-era Cambridge, his candid wit and his nuanced characterizations of sibling love and hate. (After I wrote this blog post, I found out he works periodically as a freelance research editor at the magazine.)

Last book I loved:

I know everyone has already read Michael Lewis's "The Big Short," about some of the individuals who cashed in betting on the financial collapse in 2008, but I just got around to it. No wonder it was such a huge best seller — it makes you want to proselytize on its behalf, especially to those people who think they are destined to die not knowing what a credit default swap is. But I also feel the need to urge it on people who don't care to know what a credit default swap is (or already do). I found the book most fascinating at the human level, as Lewis answers some questions he was brilliant to think to ask: What kind of person can so clearly see what almost no one else can, and what are the costs of that vision, or contrarianism?

Unread book on my bedside table that gnaws at my conscience

"To the Finland Station," Edmund Wilson's book about the intellectual origins of the Russian Revolution, is truly a beautiful book. And by that I mean, in the case of my copy, at least, it is wholly pristine, despite the four years it has spent in the stack on my bedside table. I think I am slightly undone by the review excerpted on the back jacket, which says, "The first thing that strikes us about 'To the Finland Station' is the breathtaking vastness of its scope." I just read that sentence and I am immediately exhausted. Why do I persist in keeping this book on my bedside table? Someone I admire recommended it. Plus, I must harbor the expectation that I will one day wake up and discover that my brain has been reconfigured into that of someone who cannot put this book down. I am apparently waiting very patiently for that day to arrive.

Three books in my field that I highly recommend:

I'm not exactly sure what my field is, but here are three nonfiction books that are truly great.

"Killings," by Calvin Trilllin. "Killings" is a collection of pieces that are all ostensibly about small-town murders, but are really about American values, the imperatives of  local cultures and deadly quirks of fate. Trillin relies on court documents and local interviews to tell one great heartbreak of a story after another.

"Profiles," by Kenneth Tynan. The worst thing one can say about Tynan is that he might be partially responsible for emboldening, a generation or two later, many failed impersonators, authors of the kind of overwritten, heavy on first-person profiles that Jennifer Egan skewers brilliantly in "A Visit From the Goon Squad." But Tynan's profiles are rich, psychologically astute, inventive and reported with the zeal of a historian.

"Hiroshima," by John Hersey. Terse, understated, beyond thorough — Hersey famously took one of the most overwhelming moments in history and boiled it down to a book that is all the more powerful for its conciseness.

Book most people might assume is boring, but is actually not boring:

I'm halfway through Anne Fadiman's "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," (which somebody at her publishing house sent me because it has recently been reissued — thank you, whoever that was). I resisted it for weeks, because it was not immediately obvious to me that I would like a book about, as its subtitle spells out, "A Hmong Child, her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures." I also think the title is lethal. But the book itself is a subtle shock to the system, portraying our medical culture — with all its oddities and bizarre rites — as seen through the eyes of Hmong immigrants, people with a wholly different, fascinating belief system. And throughout it all, there is the devastating story of a young, ill girl being failed by so many people, all of them trying desperately to help the best way they can.

Then there are the books that sound like homework, just because they are old, but are actually barnburning, literary page-turners: I think of Trollope as the most overlooked among even people who love Henry James or George Eliot.

One book I would recommend to anyone

"Just Kids," by Patti Smith. What does it mean to live for art? Where does creativity come from? Patti Smith answers these questions, as much as they can be answered, as only a true artist could. "Just Kids" is like an X-ray of an artist's soul, plus love story, plus cultural history, plus poetry.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The Lives They Lived: The Music They Made

By Wm. Ferguson

The Music They Made: A sound collage featuring a sampling of the musicians who died in 2012.

Welcome to the fifth annual installment of The Music They Made, a sound collage featuring the musicians who died in the past year. As in past versions, a few (entirely coincidental and random) themes emerged in the mix for 2012. We find a statistically improbable number of divas (Whitney, Etta, Donna, Chavela), two of the greatest soul bassists ever to record — and more sitar than you would expect, all of it sounding as fresh as the day it was played. The artists were young and old, famous and belatedly famous. You can play the full versions of the songs sampled above on Spotify.

Previous The Music They Made tributes: 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008

Wm. Ferguson is an editor at the magazine.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Design: Who Made That Champagne Cork?

Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

According to legend, a French monk named Dom Pérignon realized that a cork could seal in the fizz and flavor of Champagne after he saw Spanish travelers using tree bark to plug their water gourds. But George Taber, author of "To Cork or Not to Cork," and other historians dispute this story. Taber cites evidence of Champagne corks on the Duke of Bedford's household inventory list from 1665 — several years before Dom Pérignon took charge of the vineyards at the abbey of Hautvillers. Still, Pérignon and his name remain indelibly associated with Champagne.

Historians do know a good deal about how corks were used in the 18th century, in part because King Louis XV issued an edict governing Champagne bottling. Back then, workers wedged corks in by hand, yoking them with three pieces of twine to keep them in place, according to Becky Sue Epstein, author of "Champagne: A Global History." Even so, Epstein says, these corks could erupt without warning, giving Champagne a risqué reputation and the nickname "devil's wine."

A hundred years later, workers took to wearing wire-and-gauze masks when they handled the bottles to protect against the projectiles."I know one cellar in which there are three men who have each lost an eye," wrote Thomas George Shaw, a 19th-century wine trader.

Today, many Champagne stoppers are mashed together out of cork bits, glue and food-grade silicone. They start out fat as marshmallows before they're compressed in the jaws of a machine, driven into the bottle neck and held down with a wire hood called a muselet. It's this process that gives them their ability to cling — and their distinctive mushroom shape.

"If the bottle opens with a loud pop, that means it's not cold enough," Epstein says. When Champagne has been chilled to the perfect drinking temperature — about 50 degrees — you can "ease the cork out of the bottle so it emerges with a gentle sigh."

OFF THE TOP

Harry Constantinescu is a master in the art of sabrage (opening Champagne bottles with a sword).

How did this tradition begin? One of Napoleon's officers couldn't open his Champagne and manage his horse at the same time, so he pulled his sword and beheaded the bottle. His colleagues began sabering Champagne before battles.

How do you behead a Champagne bottle? The bottle has to be within a certain temperature window, or it will shatter. It can be done with a variety of objects. I've done it with a spoon, a golf club, a fork, a butter knife.

And there are sabers made especially for this ritual? Yes, they start around $300 and go into the thousands.

So they're made of gold? Mine is 24-karat gold. I saber the bottle with the wire cage on it, and so my sword is modified to slice through metal and glass at the same time.

How many bottles can you behead in a minute? Well, at one event I did 24 bottles. But this guy from Spain did 32, so he got the world record.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: How to Read Like a Staff Writer Who Writes About Everything

Susan Dominus recently wrote for the magazine about dieting in France, a mysterious case of twitching teens and the woman who took the fall for JPMorgan Chase.

Book I'm reading now:

I couldn't bring myself to read Benjamin Anastas's "Too Good To Be True," a memoir about a New York author's descent into debt and destruction (too harrowing for this writer); but the reviews of his writing were so good, I downloaded his first novel, "An Underachiever's Diary," and have been loving pretty much every word. The book is told from the dyspeptic perspective of a twin long considered his brother's inferior, subject matter inherently fascinating to me as the mother of twin boys; but I think even if that were not the case, I would be equally charmed by his voice — his pitch-perfect recollections of '70s-era Cambridge, his candid wit and his nuanced characterizations of sibling love and hate. (After I wrote this blog post, I found out he works periodically as a freelance research editor at the magazine.)

Last book I loved:

I know everyone has already read Michael Lewis's "The Big Short," about some of the individuals who cashed in betting on the financial collapse in 2008, but I just got around to it. No wonder it was such a huge best seller — it makes you want to proselytize on its behalf, especially to those people who think they are destined to die not knowing what a credit default swap is. But I also feel the need to urge it on people who don't care to know what a credit default swap is (or already do). I found the book most fascinating at the human level, as Lewis answers some questions he was brilliant to think to ask: What kind of person can so clearly see what almost no one else can, and what are the costs of that vision, or contrarianism?

Unread book on my bedside table that gnaws at my conscience

"To the Finland Station," Edmund Wilson's book about the intellectual origins of the Russian Revolution, is truly a beautiful book. And by that I mean, in the case of my copy, at least, it is wholly pristine, despite the four years it has spent in the stack on my bedside table. I think I am slightly undone by the review excerpted on the back jacket, which says, "The first thing that strikes us about 'To the Finland Station' is the breathtaking vastness of its scope." I just read that sentence and I am immediately exhausted. Why do I persist in keeping this book on my bedside table? Someone I admire recommended it. Plus, I must harbor the expectation that I will one day wake up and discover that my brain has been reconfigured into that of someone who cannot put this book down. I am apparently waiting very patiently for that day to arrive.

Three books in my field that I highly recommend:

I'm not exactly sure what my field is, but here are three nonfiction books that are truly great.

"Killings," by Calvin Trilllin. "Killings" is a collection of pieces that are all ostensibly about small-town murders, but are really about American values, the imperatives of  local cultures and deadly quirks of fate. Trillin relies on court documents and local interviews to tell one great heartbreak of a story after another.

"Profiles," by Kenneth Tynan. The worst thing one can say about Tynan is that he might be partially responsible for emboldening, a generation or two later, many failed impersonators, authors of the kind of overwritten, heavy on first-person profiles that Jennifer Egan skewers brilliantly in "A Visit From the Goon Squad." But Tynan's profiles are rich, psychologically astute, inventive and reported with the zeal of a historian.

"Hiroshima," by John Hersey. Terse, understated, beyond thorough — Hersey famously took one of the most overwhelming moments in history and boiled it down to a book that is all the more powerful for its conciseness.

Book most people might assume is boring, but is actually not boring:

I'm halfway through Anne Fadiman's "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," (which somebody at her publishing house sent me because it has recently been reissued — thank you, whoever that was). I resisted it for weeks, because it was not immediately obvious to me that I would like a book about, as its subtitle spells out, "A Hmong Child, her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures." I also think the title is lethal. But the book itself is a subtle shock to the system, portraying our medical culture — with all its oddities and bizarre rites — as seen through the eyes of Hmong immigrants, people with a wholly different, fascinating belief system. And throughout it all, there is the devastating story of a young, ill girl being failed by so many people, all of them trying desperately to help the best way they can.

Then there are the books that sound like homework, just because they are old, but are actually barnburning, literary page-turners: I think of Trollope as the most overlooked among even people who love Henry James or George Eliot.

One book I would recommend to anyone

"Just Kids," by Patti Smith. What does it mean to live for art? Where does creativity come from? Patti Smith answers these questions, as much as they can be answered, as only a true artist could. "Just Kids" is like an X-ray of an artist's soul, plus love story, plus cultural history, plus poetry.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Design: Who Made That Champagne Cork?

Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

According to legend, a French monk named Dom Pérignon realized that a cork could seal in the fizz and flavor of Champagne after he saw Spanish travelers using tree bark to plug their water gourds. But George Taber, author of "To Cork or Not to Cork," and other historians dispute this story. Taber cites evidence of Champagne corks on the Duke of Bedford's household inventory list from 1665 — several years before Dom Pérignon took charge of the vineyards at the abbey of Hautvillers. Still, Pérignon and his name remain indelibly associated with Champagne.

Historians do know a good deal about how corks were used in the 18th century, in part because King Louis XV issued an edict governing Champagne bottling. Back then, workers wedged corks in by hand, yoking them with three pieces of twine to keep them in place, according to Becky Sue Epstein, author of "Champagne: A Global History." Even so, Epstein says, these corks could erupt without warning, giving Champagne a risqué reputation and the nickname "devil's wine."

A hundred years later, workers took to wearing wire-and-gauze masks when they handled the bottles to protect against the projectiles."I know one cellar in which there are three men who have each lost an eye," wrote Thomas George Shaw, a 19th-century wine trader.

Today, many Champagne stoppers are mashed together out of cork bits, glue and food-grade silicone. They start out fat as marshmallows before they're compressed in the jaws of a machine, driven into the bottle neck and held down with a wire hood called a muselet. It's this process that gives them their ability to cling — and their distinctive mushroom shape.

"If the bottle opens with a loud pop, that means it's not cold enough," Epstein says. When Champagne has been chilled to the perfect drinking temperature — about 50 degrees — you can "ease the cork out of the bottle so it emerges with a gentle sigh."

OFF THE TOP

Harry Constantinescu is a master in the art of sabrage (opening Champagne bottles with a sword).

How did this tradition begin? One of Napoleon's officers couldn't open his Champagne and manage his horse at the same time, so he pulled his sword and beheaded the bottle. His colleagues began sabering Champagne before battles.

How do you behead a Champagne bottle? The bottle has to be within a certain temperature window, or it will shatter. It can be done with a variety of objects. I've done it with a spoon, a golf club, a fork, a butter knife.

And there are sabers made especially for this ritual? Yes, they start around $300 and go into the thousands.

So they're made of gold? Mine is 24-karat gold. I saber the bottle with the wire cage on it, and so my sword is modified to slice through metal and glass at the same time.

How many bottles can you behead in a minute? Well, at one event I did 24 bottles. But this guy from Spain did 32, so he got the world record.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Lives: Our Family Christmas, Rescinded

Several years ago, my mother announced that she was spending Christmas in Egypt with friends. I flew home anyway, alone, and spent two days making homemade pierogies and sauerkraut and bread for the traditional Carpatho-Rusyn meal we always have on Christmas Eve. At 10 p.m., my sister had an hour off from her rounds at the hospital. She came home and we ate. Then she left, and I did the dishes.

You might say I have a strong sense of tradition, if you didn't recognize the heavy press of bereavement on these proceedings, the fear that the past is lost forever. "The possible ranks higher than the actual," Martin Heidegger wrote. Our visions of an ideal holiday erase our memories of the opposite. Like elephants, we return to the place where something disappeared long ago, hoping to get that old feeling back.

This compulsive pursuit of the past also explains why, when my mom called to tell me she didn't want me to stay with her over Christmas this year, I felt it must be some misunderstanding. "I'm 70 years old," she explained. "I don't have many Christmases left in me. I can't handle the chaos and the noise anymore." She offered to pay for me and my family to stay in a hotel instead.

"It's your house," I said finally of the place I (myopically) consider mine more than any other. I imagined myself under a starched white sheet, listening to strangers come and go in a hotel hallway on Christmas Eve. "You should do whatever you want," I said. Then I put down the phone and cried.

I could have protested her decision, but I knew that I would merely be seen as playing to type, following the same pushy emotional script my family has heard so many times before. Or, as my sister put it years ago when I moved in with yet another boyfriend, "Same old story, different year." We want our comforting traditions to stay suspended in sap while our families constantly revise their understanding of us like software that updates automatically. Instead, traditions crumble and nostalgia yields to melancholy, but our identities, to our families, are as fixed and stagnant as fossils behind glass.

Anxious to demonstrate how mature and flexible we've become, we return to our birthplaces and we're cut down to size, encountered as predictable once again. Disappointment and longing well up on a last-minute trip to the shopping mall, haunted by the mournful strains of Perry Como's "White Christmas."

Maybe I just wish I were little again. As a parent, I'm expected to smile serenely as I pour the wine and rush the baked rolls to the table, as I sign "Santa" on every package, then join my children in marveling at his generosity. I'd rather be one of the kids, tearing into presents, then gloating over my loot like a drunken pirate. Perhaps nostalgia is a natural result of being abruptly ushered from the realm of gleeful greed to the less-thrilling arena of sweating the small stuff, then receding into the background until it's time to crawl across the floor retrieving stray scraps of wrapping paper.

My mom's insistence on spending Christmas in an empty house might be her way of finally rejecting this farce. For decades now, my brother and I have returned home specifically to regress, to slouch around in dirty socks, eating Christmas cookies, ignoring my mom's soliloquies on how little time she has left. Lately we have dragged our spouses and unruly children along with us. What I perceived as abandonment could be my mom's attempt to offer an "It's a Wonderful Life"-style tour of what life would look like without her.

Maybe my mother's growing acceptance of her mortality has emancipated her from old obligations. Or maybe she's just eager to shock us out of our childish selfishness. Either way, it worked. We can see now that, without her, we are greedy babies surrounded by other greedy babies, waiting expectantly for the dinner bell to ring. We want to deny that there's an end to this story, so we remain trapped. My mother, though, is free to forge a new path, unburdened by the decay of history.

But we'll all come together again on Christmas Eve, the trapped and the free, to endure the noise and the chaos. The possible ranks higher than the actual. I'm really looking forward to it.

Heather Havrilesky is the author of a memoir, "Disaster Preparedness."

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Our Top 10 Photo Books of 2012

"What is a book?" Believe it or not, the question was asked more than once in the photo department's informal but very serious deliberations over the best books of 2012. There was much agonizing and jockeying for favorites as we tried to reduce an array of more than 500 books to just 10 favorites. Ultimately, the most important question, the one that ruled the day, was "Which books do you most want to have on your shelf?" Here are the answers, in no particular order.

"Story" (SF Camerawork), by Gerald Slota
You have to respect a monograph whose own foreword likens the pictures to "a psychotic arts-and-crafts scrapbooker." Slota starts with photographs, his own and others', then scratches, cuts and writes over them; the results are idiosyncratic, emotional and sometimes disturbing. An accompanying essay by Joyce Carol Oates (in which she writes about seeing his work in this magazine for the first time) describes the "quick snaps of arrested narrative" that make his images so mesmerizing. She writes, "Woe to the mere writer whose words appear alongside the artist's visceral yet dreamlike works of unsurpassing beauty and unease!" Well put.

"Looking for Love" (Kominek), by Alec Soth
A small volume of photographs taken mostly in 1996, when Soth was working in a printing lab and just beginning to focus on his own photography. But in "Looking for Love," Soth's keen observation of character and human longing are already on display. The self-portrait of Soth on his wedding day at the end of the book is a bonus.

"Coexistence" (Centre National De L'Audiovisual/Nobody), by Stephen Gill
Gill was commissioned by the Centre National De L'Audiovisual in Luxembourg to photograph a former cooling pond at an industrial site in Dudelange. Though he set out to capture the life of the pond after it fell into disuse, Gill's project soon expanded to include the surrounding community. The resulting mix of studies of microscopic plant and animal life in the pond and of local residents, taken with a camera dipped in water, beautifully reflect the relation between individuals and environments.

"Story Teller" (Abrams), by Tim Walker
"Fashion photography is the dream department of photography," Walker says in "Story Teller." Snails and spiders climb up walls. Fashion models dance with skeletons, become mechanical windup toys or ride on spaceships — Walker's ethereal, whimsical, sometimes disturbing photographs are certainly the stuff of dreams.

"Avedon: Murals and Portraits" (Abrams), by Richard Avedon
A brilliant and beautifully designed collection of photographs primarily from the '60s and early '70s, when Avedon, already an acknowledged legend, was going through some public and formative failures. (Mary Panzer describes them in her smart introduction.) The book includes Avedon's murals of the Ginsberg family, Andy Warhol and the Factory, the Mission Council in Vietnam and the Chicago Seven, as well as portraits of civil rights figures, journalists in Vietnam and countercultural figures.

"Toiletpaper" (Freedman Damiani), by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari
The only unanimous selection on our list, "Toiletpaper" is full of things the likes of which we had never seen before. The pictures — which Cattelan and Ferrari created for their magazine of the same name — are strange, surreal, sometimes lurid, sometimes hilarious. The cover image alone, of a canary whose wings are about to be cut, is indelible.

"Vanilla Partner" (Mack), by Torbjørn Rødland
Rødland's portraits, still-lifes and landscapes, mostly made in commonplace settings, are deceptively simple. But at the same time, his pictures — an infant whose face and head are covered in spaghetti, a young man just tarred and feathered, an octopus tentacle wrapped around a woman's wrist — are also threatening and otherworldly.

"Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective" (Guggenheim/SFMOMA), by Rineke Dijkstra
An accompaniment to Dijkstra's midcareer retrospective at the Guggenheim earlier this year, the book is an appraisal of one of the great portrait photographers at work today. From her early Beach Portraits, photographs of children and adolescents at the beach in the 1990s, to later works in which she photographed new mothers just after childbirth or Israeli soldiers, Dijkstra's portraits are open, vulnerable and delicate.

"Nostalgia: The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II Captured in Color Photographs" (Gestalten), by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii
One of the first to experiment with color photography, Prokudin-Gorskii made his pictures mostly between 1905 and 1915, on long expeditions sponsored by the czar. A special camera would take three consecutive exposures, each time using a different color filter, and then a special prism projector would combine them for viewing. They were not easily reproduced in print, however. Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia after the revolution, taking his plates with him; eventually they were donated to the Library of Congress. "Nostalgia" reproduces them in print for the first time.

"Soho" (The Photographers' Gallery/Mack), by Anders Petersen
Anders Petersen's intimate, high-contrast black-and-white portrait of London's Soho. For the project, commissioned by the Photographers' Gallery, Petersen immersed himself in the neighborhood for a month in 2011. His enthusiasm is a constant presence — he can even be seen in an inadvertent self-portrait photographing a woman blow-drying her hair — as he documents Soho's wealth of characters, their haunts and fashions, their vain postures and their awkward embraces.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Jerry Seinfeld, Comedy Athlete

December 24, 2012 | Updated Read a response from Jerry Seinfeld at the end of the post.

In this weekend's cover story, Jerry Seinfeld comes across as a kind of comedy jock. As the writer, Jonah Weiner, puts it, Seinfeld "sees himself more as exacting athlete than tortured artist." He uses baseball imagery to explain his craft. He identifies with Ichiro Suzuki. ("This is the guy I relate to more than any athlete.") And he says this:

I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don't I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.

There's a hidden punchline in there: the article he's referring to is one of our own, in a manner of speaking, Daniel Coyle's cover story from the March 2007 issue of Play magazine, "How to Grow a Super Athlete." Coyle was trying to get to the bottom of why some places become hotbeds of talent and how the "dumpy" Spartak facility in Moscow in particular had produced so many top tennis players. The answer, of course, is complicated (like Russia itself), but ultimately he finds that the expression of great skill depends on the neurological process of myelination, the insulating of nerve fibers so that signals move quickly and efficiently between neurons.

Turns out that deep, focused practice leads to greater levels myelin production, better insulation. One neurologist tells Coyle, "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." Another says: "What do good athletes do when they train? . . . . They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us."

So, Seinfeld's been myelinating himself! (There might be some grist for a Seinfeld joke in the possibility that a New York Times story has been partly responsible for Seinfeld going about his business in such a way as to make him an appealing subject for a New York Times story.)

I have to admit to some slight skepticism, though. Can myelination really account for something as seemingly (and delightfully) mysterious as humor, as being funny? I put this to Coyle, whose story for Play led to his book, "The Talent Code." (He also breaks down Seinfeld's joke-making process on his own Web site.) His response:

The deep practice takes you only so far, especially with soft skills like comedy. As with so many other pursuits, you also need kind of adaptive, strategic component that directs and fuels the practice — the gritty guy working in a lab of his own making, like [Seinfeld] does, ruthlessly refining the craft. . . . If the metaphor for deep practice is construction (connecting wires, making them work fast), then the metaphor for the second process is building the ability to draw the construction blueprint — and to redraw it over and over, as needed. . . . So is this second-level, "blueprint-drawing" circuitry made of myelin? Neurologists I know would say: if it's about building a reliable circuit in the brain, then it's about myelin.

There you have it, I guess. Biology is destiny, and sometimes it makes you laugh.

Update: Jerry Seinfeld wrote to respond. I think he's calling me unfunny, but I'm pasting his thoughts below anyway. Thanks, I'm here all week.

OK. I am a thousand per cent sure there is not one other Comedy/Science Super Geek out there like me interested in myelination of comedianization.

But I do love this subject and must comment here as it is the only time this is ever going to come up in the Universe.

Just to clarify, building your myelin has nothing to do with being funny.

You could have my myelin. It won't help. (As evidenced by the suggestion that the connection between these two articles could be 'grist' for comedy. Oh my god, Dean, I can't even believe how unfunny that is.)

But here is how myelin works in comedy.

Being a comedian is two basic skills. One, being funny, which is a soft skill. Two, performing a comedy bit, which is a hard skill. The second part is where the myelin comes in.

Any comedian will tell you when they do two shows in one night the second show is almost always better. Why? You've got more myelin.

Doing a joke is very similar to any sport that is mostly repetitive action fine motor skills.
It's a set of mechanical brain commands the body executes almost exactly the same way every time.

Myelin doesn't make the funny, it makes the recreating of the funny at a time and place of someone else's choosing possible. Which can be a cool career if you can do it.

But most people have experienced this myelin/comedy effect.

Ever hear a joke and then tell it to every person in your office? The last few recipients always hear the best version and laugh the most. Why?

Practice, polish, myelin. And that's why it was very helpful for me to learn that being a male stand up comedian in his fifties and being a young Russian female tennis player are exactly the same thing.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up

By Jenny Woodward

Finlay MacKay for The New York Times

Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write a Joke: The comedian describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

Jerry Seinfeld began his commute after dinner, in no particular hurry. Around quarter to 8 on a drizzly Tuesday, he left his Manhattan home — a palatial duplex apartment with picture windows and a broad terrace overlooking Central Park — and made for a nearby garage. Due to tell jokes at a comedy club downtown, he decided to drive what he calls his "city car": a 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S. Stepping into the garage, he tugged a thick fabric cover from the car. The interior was a pristine matte black, and the paint job was a startlingly luminous azure. "It's called Mexico blue — a very traditional Porsche color," Seinfeld said. "In the '70s it looked normal, but now it looks insane."

His hair, flecked with gray, was buzzed almost to the scalp, and he was dressed in light-blue Levi's, a navy knit polo and a dark wool blazer. Seinfeld, who once said he wore sneakers long into adulthood "because it reminds me I don't have a job," has lately grown partial to Nike Shox, which he likes for their extravagant cushioning, but tonight he opted for tan suede desert boots. When he's in the workplace — on a stage, microphone in hand, trying to make a crowd erupt — the feel of a harder sole helps him get into the right mind-set.

"I just tried a little Twitter experiment," Seinfeld said. His appearance, at Gotham Comedy Club, had so far been kept secret, but just before leaving home, he'd announced the gig online on a whim. "They've only got a half-hour to get there, so I'm not expecting a flash mob," he said. Gotham was an opportunity for Seinfeld to audition brand-new material and fine-tune older bits in a relatively low-stakes context. In two days, he would perform for nearly 3,000 people at Manhattan's Beacon Theater, and that show loomed large. It would be Seinfeld's first performance in New York City since 1998, not counting impromptu club appearances and the odd private event, and it would kick off a citywide tour, with performances in each of the other boroughs. Born in Brooklyn, educated in Queens and famous for a fictional Manhattan apartment, Seinfeld called the tour "a valentine," but he was, on one level, ambivalent about it. " 'The Hometown Hero Returns' is not my narrative of being a stand-up," he said. "For me, it's the hotel. It's 'I Don't Belong Here.' It's 'The Stranger Rides Into Town.' That's the proper form of this craft."

Seinfeld wondered if hordes would see his tweet and hustle over to Gotham, but sparse attendance would be fine, too. Several weeks earlier he materialized, unannounced, at the Creek and the Cave, a club in Long Island City, and performed for "14 people." Most comedians dislike telling jokes to empty seats, but at this point Seinfeld enjoys a room that offers some resistance. "I miss opening for Frankie Valli and Ben Vereen, walking out as an unknown and there's no applause: let's get it on," he said. "I once opened for Vic Damone at a nooner on a basketball court in Brooklyn. They're going, Who is this kid? Oh, god! They're sure you're not worth the trouble. But I'd win over some of those rooms." After you've helped create and starred in one of television's best-rated, best-loved sitcoms — a show that, thanks to rampant syndication, is still bursting Kramer-style into people's living rooms 14 years after its finale — tough crowds are tougher to come by. "I would love it if there were only two people there tonight," he said.

To get the Porsche out of the garage, Seinfeld had to execute something like a 12-point turn, somehow managing, as he nudged the car back and forth, not to leave chips of Mexico blue all over an unnervingly close concrete column. Seinfeld is 58, and his face is rounder and more deeply lined than it once was, but it has retained the bright-eyed boyishness of his sitcom days. He smiles readily, either at something someone else has said or — since he is frequently the funniest person within earshot — at something he came up with. His default display of amusement is to squint hard and scrunch up his nose till his front teeth protrude from a rictus grin: a groundhog tickled by the sight of his own shadow.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

God Save the British Economy

Illustration by Tadaomi Shibuya

Entering the Bank of England is like walking back in time to the old British Empire. Its brass door is attended by the Pinks, men in black hats and pink tailcoats. Vast meeting rooms are decorated with richly colored carpets, high ceilings with gold filigree and ornate furniture. Between rooms, the marble floors bear monetary-themed mosaics. One depicts the development of the British pound. Elsewhere, the mosaics take the form of constellations — a reminder that the empire and its economy once dominated everywhere you could see the stars at night.

One morning this summer, I went to the bank to visit Adam Posen, a member of its Monetary Policy Committee, the custodian of the pound. With bright red curly hair and a trim beard, Posen, who is 46, stands out in all the M.P.C.'s official photographs. He is " fatter" and "fuzzier" than the other officials, he joked. Posen also happens to be only the second American economist ever to serve on the committee.

It's impossible to imagine the uproar if President Obama ever nominated a British academic to work at the highest level of the Federal Reserve. But when Posen arrived, in September 2009, his job was to provide an outsider's perspective. The bank was trying to steer Britain through the global financial crisis, and Posen seemed like a uniquely perfect fit. In the late 1990s, when he was a 30-year-old economist, his contrarian critique of Japan's central bank and finance ministry helped that country put an end to its so-called Lost Decade. In the years since, Posen has become a well-respected adviser to (and critic of) many of the world's key financial institutions. With this appointment, Posen crossed the line from scholar to decision maker. It was the first time that he had real power.

Posen arrived in London after the acute panic of the financial crisis had given way to the long slog we're still in. At that point, policy makers around the world were given the task of assessing the damage and devising a plan that would best position the economy to function at normal levels. The United States had already responded with a roughly $800 billion stimulus package. In the spring of 2010, British voters went in another direction. They elected Prime Minister David Cameron, who had promised to reset the economy by severely cutting government spending, which would lead to significant public-sector layoffs. The economy's only chance to return to long-term growth, Cameron argued, would be a painful, but brief, period of austerity. By shrinking the size of an inefficient government, Cameron explained, the budget would be balanced by 2015 and the private sector could lead the economy to full recovery.

Today these two approaches offer a crucial case study and perhaps a breakthrough in an age-old economic argument of austerity versus stimulus. In the past few years, the United States has experienced a steep downturn followed by a steady (though horrendously slow) upturn. The U.S. unemployment rate, which shot up to 10 percent at the end of 2009 from 4.4 percent in mid-2007, has now dropped steadily to 7.7 percent. It might be a frustrating pace, but it's enough to persuade most economists that a recovery is under way.

The British economy, however, is profoundly stuck. Between fall 2007 and summer 2009, its unemployment rate jumped to 7.9 percent, from 5.2 percent. Yet in the three and a half years since — even despite the stimulus provided by this summer's Olympic Games — the number has hovered around 7.9. The overall level of economic activity, real G.D.P., is still below where it was five years ago, too. Historically, it's almost unimaginable for a major economy to be poorer than it was half a decade ago. (By comparison, the United States has a real G.D.P. that is around a half-trillion dollars more than it was in 2007.) Yet austerity's advocates continue to argue, as Cameron has, that Britain's economic stagnation shows that the government is still crowding out private-sector investment. This, they say, is proof that austerity is even more essential than was first realized. Once the debts have been paid off and the euro zone solves its political problems, the thinking goes, the British economy will bounce back quickly.

When I visited Posen this summer, he refused to publicly criticize a sitting administration's policies, but every time the topic of austerity came up, he was unable to hide his frustration. Posen's term ended in August, and his subsequent nondisclosure agreement expired last month. Now he wants to persuade everyone he can that Britain should abandon its austerity program. He says that he has a solution that would quickly return healthy economic growth. His critics say that his prescription would bring about another financial panic. But whether you think he's right or wrong depends on what you make of the data.

Economics often appears to be an exercise in number-crunching, but it actually resembles storytelling more than mathematics. Before the members of the Monetary Policy Committee gather for their monthly meeting, they sit through a presentation from the Bank of England's economic staff. The staff members take the most recent economic data — G.D.P. growth, the unemployment rate and more subtle details gathered from interviews with businesspeople throughout the country — and try to fashion it into a narrative. Does a sudden spike in new factory orders represent a fundamental shift, or is it just a preholiday blip? Do anecdotal reports of rising food prices herald a period of inflation, or is it the result of a cold snap? Which story feels truer?

A few days later, each of the nine members of the M.P.C. puts forth his or her own interpretation. Over two days, the members debate these competing narratives and discuss what the Bank of England should do. Then the committee votes, and the winning policies are implemented.

Soon after Cameron was elected, Posen argued that the committee should endorse a more radical, expansionary approach of economic recovery. He believed that the data indicated the sputtering would end and the economy would grow only if the Bank of England began buying many billions of pounds' more worth of bonds. This added stimulus would flood the banking system with new cash and indirectly push banks to lend to businesses and citizens. (Banks don't make money by sitting on cash.) Some of Posen's colleagues warned that this would lead to inflation. He countered that the economy was operating below its capacity, so there was no reason to fear inflation.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Lives: Our Family Christmas, Rescinded

Several years ago, my mother announced that she was spending Christmas in Egypt with friends. I flew home anyway, alone, and spent two days making homemade pierogies and sauerkraut and bread for the traditional Carpatho-Rusyn meal we always have on Christmas Eve. At 10 p.m., my sister had an hour off from her rounds at the hospital. She came home and we ate. Then she left, and I did the dishes.

You might say I have a strong sense of tradition, if you didn't recognize the heavy press of bereavement on these proceedings, the fear that the past is lost forever. "The possible ranks higher than the actual," Martin Heidegger wrote. Our visions of an ideal holiday erase our memories of the opposite. Like elephants, we return to the place where something disappeared long ago, hoping to get that old feeling back.

This compulsive pursuit of the past also explains why, when my mom called to tell me she didn't want me to stay with her over Christmas this year, I felt it must be some misunderstanding. "I'm 70 years old," she explained. "I don't have many Christmases left in me. I can't handle the chaos and the noise anymore." She offered to pay for me and my family to stay in a hotel instead.

"It's your house," I said finally of the place I (myopically) consider mine more than any other. I imagined myself under a starched white sheet, listening to strangers come and go in a hotel hallway on Christmas Eve. "You should do whatever you want," I said. Then I put down the phone and cried.

I could have protested her decision, but I knew that I would merely be seen as playing to type, following the same pushy emotional script my family has heard so many times before. Or, as my sister put it years ago when I moved in with yet another boyfriend, "Same old story, different year." We want our comforting traditions to stay suspended in sap while our families constantly revise their understanding of us like software that updates automatically. Instead, traditions crumble and nostalgia yields to melancholy, but our identities, to our families, are as fixed and stagnant as fossils behind glass.

Anxious to demonstrate how mature and flexible we've become, we return to our birthplaces and we're cut down to size, encountered as predictable once again. Disappointment and longing well up on a last-minute trip to the shopping mall, haunted by the mournful strains of Perry Como's "White Christmas."

Maybe I just wish I were little again. As a parent, I'm expected to smile serenely as I pour the wine and rush the baked rolls to the table, as I sign "Santa" on every package, then join my children in marveling at his generosity. I'd rather be one of the kids, tearing into presents, then gloating over my loot like a drunken pirate. Perhaps nostalgia is a natural result of being abruptly ushered from the realm of gleeful greed to the less-thrilling arena of sweating the small stuff, then receding into the background until it's time to crawl across the floor retrieving stray scraps of wrapping paper.

My mom's insistence on spending Christmas in an empty house might be her way of finally rejecting this farce. For decades now, my brother and I have returned home specifically to regress, to slouch around in dirty socks, eating Christmas cookies, ignoring my mom's soliloquies on how little time she has left. Lately we have dragged our spouses and unruly children along with us. What I perceived as abandonment could be my mom's attempt to offer an "It's a Wonderful Life"-style tour of what life would look like without her.

Maybe my mother's growing acceptance of her mortality has emancipated her from old obligations. Or maybe she's just eager to shock us out of our childish selfishness. Either way, it worked. We can see now that, without her, we are greedy babies surrounded by other greedy babies, waiting expectantly for the dinner bell to ring. We want to deny that there's an end to this story, so we remain trapped. My mother, though, is free to forge a new path, unburdened by the decay of history.

But we'll all come together again on Christmas Eve, the trapped and the free, to endure the noise and the chaos. The possible ranks higher than the actual. I'm really looking forward to it.

Heather Havrilesky is the author of a memoir, "Disaster Preparedness."

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?

Claudia Steinman saw her husband's BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody's mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — "Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear Dr. Steinman, I have good news for you. The Nobel Assembly has today decided to award you the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2011." Before she finished reading, Claudia was hollering at her daughter to wake up. "Dad got the Nobel!" she cried. Alexis, still half-asleep, told her she was crazy. Her father had been dead for three days.

Steinman: Photograph by Ingbert Grüttner/Rockefeller University. Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.

Ralph Steinman in 1983. He would become his most compelling experiment.

Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.

The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks something like a sea anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling.

The Nobel Foundation doesn't allow posthumous awards, so when news of Ralph Steinman's death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal mishap ("Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate"), they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That Steinman's eligibility was even in question, that he'd been dead for just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor miracle.

In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, "Don't Google it."

But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis — as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman, the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment.

In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body's own ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever work for him.

Steinman would be the only patient in this makeshift trial, but the personalized approach for which he would serve as both visionary and guinea pig has implications for the rest of us. It is known as cancer immunotherapy, and its offshoots have just now begun to make their way into the clinic, and treatments have been approved for tumors of the skin and of the prostate. For his last experiment, conducted with no control group, Steinman would try to make his life into a useful anecdote — a test of how the treatments he assembled might be put to work. "Once he got diagnosed with cancer, he really started talking about changing the paradigm of cancer treatment," his daughter Alexis says. "That's all he knew how to do. He knew how to be a scientist."

First, Steinman needed to see his tumor. Not an M.R.I. or CT scan, but the material itself. The trouble was that most people with his cancer never have surgery. If there's cause to think the tumor has spread — and there usually is — it may not be worth the risk of having it removed, along with the bile duct, the gallbladder, large portions of the stomach and the duodenum. Luckily for Steinman, early scans showed that his tumor was a candidate for resection. On the morning of April 3, 2007, less than two weeks after his diagnosis, he went in for the four-hour procedure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, just across the avenue from his office at Rockefeller University.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?

Claudia Steinman saw her husband's BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody's mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — "Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear Dr. Steinman, I have good news for you. The Nobel Assembly has today decided to award you the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2011." Before she finished reading, Claudia was hollering at her daughter to wake up. "Dad got the Nobel!" she cried. Alexis, still half-asleep, told her she was crazy. Her father had been dead for three days.

Steinman: Photograph by Ingbert Grüttner/Rockefeller University. Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.

Ralph Steinman in 1983. He would become his most compelling experiment.

Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.

The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks something like a sea anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling.

The Nobel Foundation doesn't allow posthumous awards, so when news of Ralph Steinman's death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal mishap ("Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate"), they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That Steinman's eligibility was even in question, that he'd been dead for just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor miracle.

In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, "Don't Google it."

But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis — as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman, the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment.

In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body's own ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever work for him.

Steinman would be the only patient in this makeshift trial, but the personalized approach for which he would serve as both visionary and guinea pig has implications for the rest of us. It is known as cancer immunotherapy, and its offshoots have just now begun to make their way into the clinic, and treatments have been approved for tumors of the skin and of the prostate. For his last experiment, conducted with no control group, Steinman would try to make his life into a useful anecdote — a test of how the treatments he assembled might be put to work. "Once he got diagnosed with cancer, he really started talking about changing the paradigm of cancer treatment," his daughter Alexis says. "That's all he knew how to do. He knew how to be a scientist."

First, Steinman needed to see his tumor. Not an M.R.I. or CT scan, but the material itself. The trouble was that most people with his cancer never have surgery. If there's cause to think the tumor has spread — and there usually is — it may not be worth the risk of having it removed, along with the bile duct, the gallbladder, large portions of the stomach and the duodenum. Luckily for Steinman, early scans showed that his tumor was a candidate for resection. On the morning of April 3, 2007, less than two weeks after his diagnosis, he went in for the four-hour procedure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, just across the avenue from his office at Rockefeller University.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Jerry Seinfeld, Comedy Athlete

In this weekend's cover story, Jerry Seinfeld comes across as a kind of comedy jock. As the writer, Jonah Weiner, puts it, Seinfeld "sees himself more as exacting athlete than tortured artist." He uses baseball imagery to explain his craft. He identifies with Ichiro Suzuki. ("This is the guy I relate to more than any athlete.") And he says this:

I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don't I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.

There's a hidden punchline in there: the article he's referring to is one of our own, in a manner of speaking, Daniel Coyle's cover story from the March 2007 issue of Play magazine, "How to Grow a Super Athlete." Coyle was trying to get to the bottom of why some places become hotbeds of talent and how the "dumpy" Spartak facility in Moscow in particular had produced so many top tennis players. The answer, of course, is complicated (like Russia itself), but ultimately he finds that the expression of great skill depends on the neurological process of myelination, the insulating of nerve fibers so that signals move quickly and efficiently between neurons.

Turns out that deep, focused practice leads to greater levels myelin production, better insulation. One neurologist tells Coyle, "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." Another says: "What do good athletes do when they train? . . . . They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us."

So, Seinfeld's been myelinating himself! (There might be some grist for a Seinfeld joke in the possibility that a New York Times story has been partly responsible for Seinfeld going about his business in such a way as to make him an appealing subject for a New York Times story.)

I have to admit to some slight skepticism, though. Can myelination really account for something as seemingly (and delightfully) mysterious as humor, as being funny? I put this to Coyle, whose story for Play led to his book, "The Talent Code." (He also breaks down Seinfeld's joke-making process on his own Web site.) His response:

The deep practice takes you only so far, especially with soft skills like comedy. As with so many other pursuits, you also need kind of adaptive, strategic component that directs and fuels the practice — the gritty guy working in a lab of his own making, like [Seinfeld] does, ruthlessly refining the craft. . . . If the metaphor for deep practice is construction (connecting wires, making them work fast), then the metaphor for the second process is building the ability to draw the construction blueprint — and to redraw it over and over, as needed. . . . So is this second-level, "blueprint-drawing" circuitry made of myelin? Neurologists I know would say: if it's about building a reliable circuit in the brain, then it's about myelin.

There you have it, I guess. Biology is destiny, and sometimes it makes you laugh.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Reply All | Letters: The 12.9.12 Issue

If only the powers-that-be in Hollywood and elsewhere would take to heart the main thrust of A. O. Scott's article: that women can play many roles, coming to the forefront as protagonists, whether as a superhero or a kid or a mother or a regular person who finds herself thrust into a high-stakes situation. Any of these roles can be interesting, valuable, artistically desirable and box-office viable. While I'm glad Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Lisbeth Salander and others in their mold exist, inclusiveness of the full range of the female human experience is what should be striven for in film, right alongside our male counterparts. TONYA JARRETT, San Diego, posted on nytimes.com

To truly understand why the big screen is so lacking in women, you need only to follow the money. Hollywood is just another version of virtually every boardroom in corporate America. Movies made by men are greenlighted to provide entertainment for men (you hear endlessly that movie-audience demographics skew toward young men). Occasionally they will finance a project with a female protagonist who is even better at being a man than a man. CAROL MCCANN, New York, posted on nytimes.com

What about movies for children? I have three young daughters. Aside from the pink ghetto, kids' media — whether PBS or Disney — put male characters front and center. Female characters are sidelined or not there at all — just look at the posters for children's movies (with the exception of "Brave"). There is no reason for the imaginary world to be sexist. MARGOT MAGOWAN, San Francisco, posted on nytimes.com

To me, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" — which stars one of your "heroines," Quvenzhané Wallis — does not celebrate a heroine. Hushpuppy is spunky and determined, to be sure, but also ignorant and powerless. She resorts to setting a destructive fire to get her way. She clings to a prostitute for affection. She's cute, but all she has going for her might be extinguished before reaching adulthood. The little schooling she receives will not equip her for the real world. The film plays into the myth of the noble savage, of the capacity for joy even among the destitute, but that joy seems to be fueled in the adults around Hushpuppy by alcohol and other ways of numbing the pain of existence. If Hushpuppy is any sort of heroine, she's a tragic one. ELIZABETH FULLER, Peterborough, N.H., posted on nytimes.com

NYT did an actual mermaid Rebel Wilson photo shoot! What have I done to deserve such greatness? @goddesspharo, via Twitter

FILM CULTURE ISN'T DEAD AFTER ALL

Every time you're ready to declare a new movie a "masterwork," go back and take another look at "Sunrise" or "The Rules of the Game" and ask yourself whether that appellation is in fact justified. The thing about great movies (or great paintings or great novels) is that they're so few and far between that their accidental discovery makes the whole process of moviegoing eminently worthwhile. And I use the word "accidental" advisedly: not even all of Murnau's work was great, nor all of Renoir's. And certainly not all of Spielberg's. STU FREEMAN, Brooklyn, posted on nytimes.com

Most people these days are not interested in much beyond their little hand-held blue screens. Going to a movie has become unenjoyable — I am distracted everywhere by those little rectangular fireflies. I have started to retreat to my private world in which I can enjoy film as I remember it from my youth: dark, quiet and solitary. I can marvel at the last scene in "Throne of Blood" knowing that those arrows were not propelled by any C.G.I. team or that Burt Lancaster did all of his own stunts in "The Train." Harrison Ford still has what it takes to be an action star as Indiana Jones. Who needs therapy when I have "A Day at the Races" or "The Music Box"? DONALD WAITS, New Orleans, posted on nytimes.com

THE 'MAD MEN' ECONOMIC MIRACLE

Cable is already obsolete. Rather than paying exorbitant fees for a service that many don't fully utilize, it makes more sense to view the programs à la carte over the Internet. Young people know this, even if not all of us oldsters do. The real danger is that the Internet monopolies, which are the same as the cable monopolies, will try to recapture their profits and maintain their monopolies through bandwidth caps. They have already positioned themselves to do this by imposing caps so high that few customers are affected; now all they need to do is tighten the limits. It is urgently important that the government treat these companies as regulated monopolies and ban them from placing limits on bandwidth. Content providers should offer good shows for a reasonable fee — and people will pay for these. But if the monopolists keep the price too high, the black market in pirated shows will thrive. JOSHUA P. HILL, New London, Conn., posted on nytimes.com

I used to be one of those 20-somethings who scoured the Internet for free torrents. But the pain of downloading viruses, dummy files and the annoying pop-ups has made me gladly go to Amazon and pay $1.99 an episode. I wish Showtime and other networks would give you an option to pay or subscribe directly to episodes through their Web sites. I imagine the bandwidth/server costs will be expensive at first, but folks like me are game. I don't want to commit to paying for cable. But for instant self-selected gratification, I'm willing to pay by the episode and season directly to the networks. SHARENCARE, Boston, posted on nytimes.com

UNDOCUMENTED DINER

Chuck Klosterman claims that knowingly patronizing a business that employs illegal immigrants is not unethical. Although Klosterman admits illegal immigrants may take jobs from American workers, he asks, "Who is to say citizenship is a moral justification for employment?" He seems not to realize that businesses exploiting illegal immigrants can outcompete law-abiding businesses. The weight of all that should be sufficient to make knowingly patronizing such businesses unethical. DAVID C. HOLZMAN, Lexington, Mass.

If you examined the ethics (and morals) of every business you patronized, I think you'd find almost all of them do something or believe in something that you object to. Why does Chick-fil-A's stance on gay marriage matter in terms of whether we should eat their chicken? I'm not sure, but to some it most certainly does matter. BOBBY CALISE, New York, posted on nytimes.com

DINESH D'SOUZA

At the end of Andrew Goldman's interview, Dinesh D'Souza says, "Imprudent is not the same thing as wrong." Oh, that may be so true! But in this case, it's surely the same thing as knuckleheaded. NANCY DONNELLY, Washington, D.C.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

Lives: Our Family Christmas, Rescinded

Several years ago, my mother announced that she was spending Christmas in Egypt with friends. I flew home anyway, alone, and spent two days making homemade pierogies and sauerkraut and bread for the traditional Carpatho-Rusyn meal we always have on Christmas Eve. At 10 p.m., my sister had an hour off from her rounds at the hospital. She came home and we ate. Then she left, and I did the dishes.

You might say I have a strong sense of tradition, if you didn't recognize the heavy press of bereavement on these proceedings, the fear that the past is lost forever. "The possible ranks higher than the actual," Martin Heidegger wrote. Our visions of an ideal holiday erase our memories of the opposite. Like elephants, we return to the place where something disappeared long ago, hoping to get that old feeling back.

This compulsive pursuit of the past also explains why, when my mom called to tell me she didn't want me to stay with her over Christmas this year, I felt it must be some misunderstanding. "I'm 70 years old," she explained. "I don't have many Christmases left in me. I can't handle the chaos and the noise anymore." She offered to pay for me and my family to stay in a hotel instead.

"It's your house," I said finally of the place I (myopically) consider mine more than any other. I imagined myself under a starched white sheet, listening to strangers come and go in a hotel hallway on Christmas Eve. "You should do whatever you want," I said. Then I put down the phone and cried.

I could have protested her decision, but I knew that I would merely be seen as playing to type, following the same pushy emotional script my family has heard so many times before. Or, as my sister put it years ago when I moved in with yet another boyfriend, "Same old story, different year." We want our comforting traditions to stay suspended in sap while our families constantly revise their understanding of us like software that updates automatically. Instead, traditions crumble and nostalgia yields to melancholy, but our identities, to our families, are as fixed and stagnant as fossils behind glass.

Anxious to demonstrate how mature and flexible we've become, we return to our birthplaces and we're cut down to size, encountered as predictable once again. Disappointment and longing well up on a last-minute trip to the shopping mall, haunted by the mournful strains of Perry Como's "White Christmas."

Maybe I just wish I were little again. As a parent, I'm expected to smile serenely as I pour the wine and rush the baked rolls to the table, as I sign "Santa" on every package, then join my children in marveling at his generosity. I'd rather be one of the kids, tearing into presents, then gloating over my loot like a drunken pirate. Perhaps nostalgia is a natural result of being abruptly ushered from the realm of gleeful greed to the less-thrilling arena of sweating the small stuff, then receding into the background until it's time to crawl across the floor retrieving stray scraps of wrapping paper.

My mom's insistence on spending Christmas in an empty house might be her way of finally rejecting this farce. For decades now, my brother and I have returned home specifically to regress, to slouch around in dirty socks, eating Christmas cookies, ignoring my mom's soliloquies on how little time she has left. Lately we have dragged our spouses and unruly children along with us. What I perceived as abandonment could be my mom's attempt to offer an "It's a Wonderful Life"-style tour of what life would look like without her.

Maybe my mother's growing acceptance of her mortality has emancipated her from old obligations. Or maybe she's just eager to shock us out of our childish selfishness. Either way, it worked. We can see now that, without her, we are greedy babies surrounded by other greedy babies, waiting expectantly for the dinner bell to ring. We want to deny that there's an end to this story, so we remain trapped. My mother, though, is free to forge a new path, unburdened by the decay of history.

But we'll all come together again on Christmas Eve, the trapped and the free, to endure the noise and the chaos. The possible ranks higher than the actual. I'm really looking forward to it.

Heather Havrilesky is the author of a memoir, "Disaster Preparedness."

E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?

Claudia Steinman saw her husband's BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody's mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — "Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear Dr. Steinman, I have good news for you. The Nobel Assembly has today decided to award you the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2011." Before she finished reading, Claudia was hollering at her daughter to wake up. "Dad got the Nobel!" she cried. Alexis, still half-asleep, told her she was crazy. Her father had been dead for three days.

Steinman: Photograph by Ingbert Grüttner/Rockefeller University. Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.

Ralph Steinman in 1983. He would become his most compelling experiment.

Dendritic cell: Rockefeller University Press.

The cell Steinman hoped would save his life looks something like a sea anemone or a ruffled shrimp dumpling.

The Nobel Foundation doesn't allow posthumous awards, so when news of Ralph Steinman's death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal mishap ("Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate"), they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That Steinman's eligibility was even in question, that he'd been dead for just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor miracle.

In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, "Don't Google it."

But for a man who had spent his life in the laboratory, who brought copies of The New England Journal of Medicine on hiking trips to Vermont and always made sure that family vacations overlapped with scientific symposia, there was only one way to react to such an awful diagnosis — as a scientist. The outlook for pancreatic cancer is so poor, and the established treatments so useless, that any patient who has the disease might as well shoot the moon with new, untested therapies. For Steinman, the prognosis offered the opportunity to run one last experiment.

In the long struggle that was to come, Steinman would try anything and everything that might extend his life, but he placed his greatest hope in a field he helped create, one based on discoveries for which he would earn his Nobel Prize. He hoped to reprogram his immune cells to defeat his cancer — to concoct a set of treatments from his body's own ingredients, which could take over from his chemotherapy and form a customized, dynamic treatment for his disease. These would be as far from off-the-shelf as medicines can get: vaccines designed for the tumor in his gut, made from the products of his plasma, that could only ever work for him.

Steinman would be the only patient in this makeshift trial, but the personalized approach for which he would serve as both visionary and guinea pig has implications for the rest of us. It is known as cancer immunotherapy, and its offshoots have just now begun to make their way into the clinic, and treatments have been approved for tumors of the skin and of the prostate. For his last experiment, conducted with no control group, Steinman would try to make his life into a useful anecdote — a test of how the treatments he assembled might be put to work. "Once he got diagnosed with cancer, he really started talking about changing the paradigm of cancer treatment," his daughter Alexis says. "That's all he knew how to do. He knew how to be a scientist."

First, Steinman needed to see his tumor. Not an M.R.I. or CT scan, but the material itself. The trouble was that most people with his cancer never have surgery. If there's cause to think the tumor has spread — and there usually is — it may not be worth the risk of having it removed, along with the bile duct, the gallbladder, large portions of the stomach and the duodenum. Luckily for Steinman, early scans showed that his tumor was a candidate for resection. On the morning of April 3, 2007, less than two weeks after his diagnosis, he went in for the four-hour procedure at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, just across the avenue from his office at Rockefeller University.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Jerry Seinfeld, Comedy Athlete

In this weekend's cover story, Jerry Seinfeld comes across as a kind of comedy jock. As the writer, Jonah Weiner, puts it, Seinfeld "sees himself more as exacting athlete than tortured artist." He uses baseball imagery to explain his craft. He identifies with Ichiro Suzuki. ("This is the guy I relate to more than any athlete.") And he says this:

I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don't I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.

There's a hidden punchline in there: the article he's referring to is one of our own, in a manner of speaking, Daniel Coyle's cover story from the March 2007 issue of Play magazine, "How to Grow a Super Athlete." Coyle was trying to get to the bottom of why some places become hotbeds of talent and how the "dumpy" Spartak facility in Moscow in particular had produced so many top tennis players. The answer, of course, is complicated (like Russia itself), but ultimately he finds that the expression of great skill depends on the neurological process of myelination, the insulating of nerve fibers so that signals move quickly and efficiently between neurons.

Turns out that deep, focused practice leads to greater levels myelin production, better insulation. One neurologist tells Coyle, "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." Another says: "What do good athletes do when they train? . . . . They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us."

So, Seinfeld's been myelinating himself! (There might be some grist for a Seinfeld joke in the possibility that a New York Times story has been partly responsible for Seinfeld going about his business in such a way as to make him an appealing subject for a New York Times story.)

I have to admit to some slight skepticism, though. Can myelination really account for something as seemingly (and delightfully) mysterious as humor, as being funny? I put this to Coyle, whose story for Play led to his book, "The Talent Code." (He also breaks down Seinfeld's joke-making process on his own Web site.) His response:

The deep practice takes you only so far, especially with soft skills like comedy. As with so many other pursuits, you also need kind of adaptive, strategic component that directs and fuels the practice — the gritty guy working in a lab of his own making, like [Seinfeld] does, ruthlessly refining the craft. . . . If the metaphor for deep practice is construction (connecting wires, making them work fast), then the metaphor for the second process is building the ability to draw the construction blueprint — and to redraw it over and over, as needed. . . . So is this second-level, "blueprint-drawing" circuitry made of myelin? Neurologists I know would say: if it's about building a reliable circuit in the brain, then it's about myelin.

There you have it, I guess. Biology is destiny, and sometimes it makes you laugh.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Talk: Soledad O’Brien Is Betting on Jeff Zucker

Your memoir made your experience growing up in Smithtown, a largely white town on Long Island, sound like a huge drag.
It really wasn't. It is truly not fun to be the family that sticks out in an all-white community. On the other side, I have five brothers and sisters, we all look exactly the same and we're very, very tight. The lessons about race were not pleasant, but there are things that I loved about my childhood. In the book, I didn't want to be the tragic mulatto.

Is "tragic mulatto" a term I should know?
Oh, yeah. Google it. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature, but my life was never like that.

Before this, I didn't know you had a white Australian dad and a black Cuban mom. Would you prefer to have people not think about your race at all?
It never made a difference to me if people watching knew, but I want people to understand I'm very proud of what I am. My parents have a great story. And I think your background is critical in how you approach the stories that you're covering.

A couple of my favorite campaign moments were watching you on CNN grilling John Sununu and Rudy Giuliani. Do you enjoy making people squirm?
I like to argue whether it's with my brothers and sisters or on TV. My desk is always stacked full of first-source material so you can say, "Actually, I have a Congressional budget report, and on Page 116, it says this." I was yelled at a lot during the campaign. Mr. Giuliani yelled at me a little. That seemed unfortunate. It reminded me a lot of dealing with my 12-year-old, who's a bit sassy.

Jeff Zucker, who rose to the top of NBC Universal after producing "Today," was just named head of CNN Worldwide, and he reportedly plans to immediately focus on your morning show, which is behind in the ratings. How scared are you?
Not at all. He was my boss years ago when I worked at the "Today" show. I'm absolutely thrilled to have him back.

But can you seriously be so calm, considering that The New York Post reported that Zucker's considering moving Erin Burnett to your slot?
Listen, I have been doing this gig for a while. People go crazy with speculation every time there's a shift in leadership. I can't comment on every rumor, but so far I've read reports on me, Anderson, Piers, Ann Curry and Erin Burnett, and all that's clear to me is that somebody's busy dialing Page Six.

Who? Can you be a little more specific?
Nope.

When you were weekend co-host of "Today," you said that the recognition you got for softer stories, like one about a trapeze school, felt "a little hollow." Would you be willing to go lighter now?
I'm fairly confident that I'm not going to be cooking salmon and doing fashion shows on CNN.

But Zucker has said that CNN is not only competing with MSNBC and Fox News but also with History and the Discovery Channel, which produce shows like "Pawn Stars" and "American Chopper."
If you've ever seen "American Chopper," you know they have created something that is riveting. I don't think he's saying we're going to do "American Chopper II." I think he's saying we are going to assume that everybody is our competition. He knows how to win.

Your strength is hard news, doing the homework. I'm not convinced these traits are as prized as they once were.
I bet you $5,000 that CNN is always going to be a place for that. I have four kids to get through college, but I can cover that.

I don't make TV money. But even though betting has been frowned upon at The Times, I'll wager $750 that in a year CNN will look much more like "Ice Road Truckers."
You are so completely wrong. I will take that bet, and I will buy dinner. You should come with a check.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up

By Jenny Woodward

Finlay MacKay for The New York Times

Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write a Joke: The comedian describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

Jerry Seinfeld began his commute after dinner, in no particular hurry. Around quarter to 8 on a drizzly Tuesday, he left his Manhattan home — a palatial duplex apartment with picture windows and a broad terrace overlooking Central Park — and made for a nearby garage. Due to tell jokes at a comedy club downtown, he decided to drive what he calls his "city car": a 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S. Stepping into the garage, he tugged a thick fabric cover from the car. The interior was a pristine matte black, and the paint job was a startlingly luminous azure. "It's called Mexico blue — a very traditional Porsche color," Seinfeld said. "In the '70s it looked normal, but now it looks insane."

His hair, flecked with gray, was buzzed almost to the scalp, and he was dressed in light-blue Levi's, a navy knit polo and a dark wool blazer. Seinfeld, who once said he wore sneakers long into adulthood "because it reminds me I don't have a job," has lately grown partial to Nike Shox, which he likes for their extravagant cushioning, but tonight he opted for tan suede desert boots. When he's in the workplace — on a stage, microphone in hand, trying to make a crowd erupt — the feel of a harder sole helps him get into the right mind-set.

"I just tried a little Twitter experiment," Seinfeld said. His appearance, at Gotham Comedy Club, had so far been kept secret, but just before leaving home, he'd announced the gig online on a whim. "They've only got a half-hour to get there, so I'm not expecting a flash mob," he said. Gotham was an opportunity for Seinfeld to audition brand-new material and fine-tune older bits in a relatively low-stakes context. In two days, he would perform for nearly 3,000 people at Manhattan's Beacon Theater, and that show loomed large. It would be Seinfeld's first performance in New York City since 1998, not counting impromptu club appearances and the odd private event, and it would kick off a citywide tour, with performances in each of the other boroughs. Born in Brooklyn, educated in Queens and famous for a fictional Manhattan apartment, Seinfeld called the tour "a valentine," but he was, on one level, ambivalent about it. " 'The Hometown Hero Returns' is not my narrative of being a stand-up," he said. "For me, it's the hotel. It's 'I Don't Belong Here.' It's 'The Stranger Rides Into Town.' That's the proper form of this craft."

Seinfeld wondered if hordes would see his tweet and hustle over to Gotham, but sparse attendance would be fine, too. Several weeks earlier he materialized, unannounced, at the Creek and the Cave, a club in Long Island City, and performed for "14 people." Most comedians dislike telling jokes to empty seats, but at this point Seinfeld enjoys a room that offers some resistance. "I miss opening for Frankie Valli and Ben Vereen, walking out as an unknown and there's no applause: let's get it on," he said. "I once opened for Vic Damone at a nooner on a basketball court in Brooklyn. They're going, Who is this kid? Oh, god! They're sure you're not worth the trouble. But I'd win over some of those rooms." After you've helped create and starred in one of television's best-rated, best-loved sitcoms — a show that, thanks to rampant syndication, is still bursting Kramer-style into people's living rooms 14 years after its finale — tough crowds are tougher to come by. "I would love it if there were only two people there tonight," he said.

To get the Porsche out of the garage, Seinfeld had to execute something like a 12-point turn, somehow managing, as he nudged the car back and forth, not to leave chips of Mexico blue all over an unnervingly close concrete column. Seinfeld is 58, and his face is rounder and more deeply lined than it once was, but it has retained the bright-eyed boyishness of his sitcom days. He smiles readily, either at something someone else has said or — since he is frequently the funniest person within earshot — at something he came up with. His default display of amusement is to squint hard and scrunch up his nose till his front teeth protrude from a rictus grin: a groundhog tickled by the sight of his own shadow.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More