Bobby Cannavale, Broadway’s Hottest Outsider

Graeme Mitchell for The New York Times

Bobby Cannavale will play Charlie Castle, the movie star with a dark secret, in Clifford Odets's "Big Knife," which opens April 16.

It was a miserable morning, rainy, cold and Wednesday, so Barney Greengrass was mostly empty. Bobby Cannavale was there having breakfast with the actor Richard Kind. Cannavale buttered a bialy as Kind endured a vegetable omelet. "I've been dieting for 45 years," he said mournfully. Cannavale took his arm. "You look great, man," he said. The two friends share a trainer.

Macall B. Polay/HBO, via Everett Collection

On "Boardwalk Empire," Cannavale played a psychotically violent bootlegger. "You're laughing at him but also terrified," said the show's creator, Terence Winter.

"Here's the difference between Bobby and me," Kind said. "After a show, people wait at the stage door for him because they want to be near him, like maybe it will rub off. They don't need to touch me. They just tell me their mother likes me."

He is right about Cannavale, who became his own lucky charm in 2011, while starring with Chris Rock on Broadway in "The _____ With the Hat," by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Cannavale played a parolee trying to stay clean, unwittingly stuck in a love triangle with his addicted girlfriend and his sponsor. His high-octane performance was nominated for a Tony Award for best actor. After 20 years of slow and steady, the race was won; no one could get enough of him.

Cannavale never formally trained as an actor — he barely finished high school — and his raw talent pops from the stage, along with a big hit of beefcake. (He is versatile enough to have played gay as well, most notably as Vince, the sweet, dim cop who was Will's boyfriend on "Will and Grace." His scene with Eric McCormack, asking him to move in, had a dignity rare in sitcoms. Cannavale won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.)

Last season, his "Hat" mojo got him cast in "Boardwalk Empire" as the psychotically violent bootlegger, Gyp Rosetti. And last fall, Cannavale fulfilled a lifelong dream to work with his idol, Al Pacino; they co-starred in a Broadway revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross." Before that, he shot Woody Allen's new movie, "Blue Jasmine," with Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin; it opens in July. In each case, Cannavale said, he was hired because someone saw him in "Hat."

Many actors on a roll like this would be off to L.A., but Cannavale, 42, is a different breed. He has always lived in New York, partly so he has the option of doing theater but mostly because of his son, Jake, 17. Since Cannavale's divorce in 2004 from the screenwriter Jenny Lumet ("Rachel Getting Married"), Jake lives with him every other week.

So Cannavale is staying put. With his newfound clout, he can play a part he always wanted, Charlie Castle, the movie star with a dark secret, in Clifford Odets's "Big Knife," which opens April 16. Produced by the Roundabout Theater Company, it is the first Broadway revival of the play since its debut in 1949. Cannavale fell in love with it 15 years ago, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where he saw Kind in a production directed by Joanne Woodward. (Kind plays the same role, Hoff, the studio head, in this production.) When Kind auditioned for Woodward, Cannavale reminded him at breakfast, he was his reader, the up-and-coming nobody who takes a job running lines in the hope the director might hear him too. Kind looked blank. "He was at Joanne Woodward's apartment," Cannavale said, laughing. "He wasn't remembering me."

When he went to the men's room, Kind turned serious. "To have a friend like this, a guy who's so loyal, with a morality and a guy's ethos, he's like Clooney," he said. "You'd be shocked at how hard he works and how proud he is of being good."

I met Cannavale at his Upper West Side apartment one evening after his rehearsal. He is 6-2, long and lithe. His hair, some of it cropped, some of it hanging, is always on the move. What the cane was to Chaplin, the hair is to Cannavale; his hands are in it, on it, yanking, grabbing. At least it was clean.

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The 6th Floor Blog: What the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Listened to When They Were Kids

Back in the early 2000s, Karen O had a crush on a lame dude. "For whatever reason at that point in my life I was like yeah. I was totally into it," she told me when I was reporting this weekend's article about her and her band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Out one night at the Cooler, a now-defunct venue in the Meatpacking district in New York, the guy was ignoring her, and she was drowning her sorrows when she saw Debbie Harry at the bar. "I go up to her and I'm like, 'Yeah, um, I'm in a band and sometimes I just feel like a girl in a boys world.' She says, 'Honey, just enjoy it while it lasts.'" At the time, Karen O, whose last name is Orzolek, was horrified. "It felt condescending." But she has a different take on it now. "She's right as rain . . . I am a girl in a boys world but . . . it doesn't really matter, just enjoy it!"

For years, Orzolek had been seeking advice — albeit more subtly, usually — from any number of rock icons. As a high-school student in New Jersey, the singer had one of those life-expanding friends, the fearless teenage punk who's plugged in to the counterculture before everyone else. This girl dragged her into New York City to see bands like Sonic Youth, Pavement, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, P J Harvey and the late '90s band, Jonathan Fire*Eater (whose members later formed the group Walkmen). Around the same time she also got into the high-pitched oddness of vocalists like Neil Young and Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum.

The guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Zinner, also cites Fire*Eater as an inspiration. Zinner is the type of guy (every band has one) who can sit in the back of a bar with journalists and discuss obscure 4AD singles for hours. But then he also loves Van Halen. While we were strolling through the Brooklyn Flea Market during the time when I was working on my story, Zinner stopped in his tracks when he saw a framed Teen Beat-style poster of Van Halen in full neon spandex glory. (He restrained himself from buying it.)

Brian Chase, the Yeah Yeah Yeah's drummer,  moved to New York after college with one goal in mind: play with the composer, multi-instrumentalist and all-around musician John Zorn. Instead, he joined the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and they all became rock stars.

Here are some tracks by artists who helped the Yeah Yeah Yeahs get to where they are.

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The 6th Floor Blog: On a Cold Night in Brooklyn … a Daredevil Bike Race

If you were just about to compete in a fixed-gear bike race, in the dark, in the cold, on a course with some very sharp turns and 30 or so other competitors, your nerves would show, right? At the Red Hook Criterium last year, the photographer Benedict Evans decided to find out. "The idea," Evans, an avid cyclist himself, told me, "was to set up a kind of portable studio outdoors near the track, but it rained on the day, so I ended up renting the biggest U-Haul truck I could afford, covering the inside of it with black paper, driving it up next to the finish line and coaxing people inside it to be photographed. I figured that anyone willing to ride brakeless bikes around an intricate course in the dark of night would make for an interesting subject." You can see some of his portraits here, among them that of Dan Chabanov, a bike messenger who has won three of the five races held so far.

This year's event takes place at 9 p.m. tomorrow at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. The race consists of 24 laps that add up to 30 kilometers and takes about 45 minutes to complete. The competitors include amateur road and track enthusiasts, bike messengers and a few professional racers. The bikes themselves must all be track bikes and therefore do not have hand brakes. (There is also a 5K footrace that takes place on the same course, earlier in the evening.)

I'm no bike race aficionado, but by Lap 4 at last year's event I was hooked. Certainly the atmosphere is festive and sociable, which may have something to do with the event's unusual origins. David Trimble (shown above), the Crit's organizer and member of a family that has been racing for two generations, moved to Red Hook in 2008. Struck by the area's desolate streets, lack of traffic and policing, he set up a race among friends to celebrate his birthday. It was so popular, he did it again the following year. Five years later, he expects there will be roughly 5,000 spectators in attendance. It has also grown beyond Red Hook: Saturday's race is the first in a four-part series, with points accrued at each stop. The next three races will take place this year in Brooklyn (at the Navy Yard), Barcelona and Milan, where a champion will be crowned. Not a bad birthday party by any standards.

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Bobby Cannavale, Broadway’s Hottest Outsider

Graeme Mitchell for The New York Times

Bobby Cannavale will play Charlie Castle, the movie star with a dark secret, in Clifford Odets's "Big Knife," which opens April 16.

It was a miserable morning, rainy, cold and Wednesday, so Barney Greengrass was mostly empty. Bobby Cannavale was there having breakfast with the actor Richard Kind. Cannavale buttered a bialy as Kind endured a vegetable omelet. "I've been dieting for 45 years," he said mournfully. Cannavale took his arm. "You look great, man," he said. The two friends share a trainer.

Macall B. Polay/HBO, via Everett Collection

On "Boardwalk Empire," Cannavale played a psychotically violent bootlegger. "You're laughing at him but also terrified," said the show's creator, Terence Winter.

"Here's the difference between Bobby and me," Kind said. "After a show, people wait at the stage door for him because they want to be near him, like maybe it will rub off. They don't need to touch me. They just tell me their mother likes me."

He is right about Cannavale, who became his own lucky charm in 2011, while starring with Chris Rock on Broadway in "The _____ With the Hat," by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Cannavale played a parolee trying to stay clean, unwittingly stuck in a love triangle with his addicted girlfriend and his sponsor. His high-octane performance was nominated for a Tony Award for best actor. After 20 years of slow and steady, the race was won; no one could get enough of him.

Cannavale never formally trained as an actor — he barely finished high school — and his raw talent pops from the stage, along with a big hit of beefcake. (He is versatile enough to have played gay as well, most notably as Vince, the sweet, dim cop who was Will's boyfriend on "Will and Grace." His scene with Eric McCormack, asking him to move in, had a dignity rare in sitcoms. Cannavale won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.)

Last season, his "Hat" mojo got him cast in "Boardwalk Empire" as the psychotically violent bootlegger, Gyp Rosetti. And last fall, Cannavale fulfilled a lifelong dream to work with his idol, Al Pacino; they co-starred in a Broadway revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross." Before that, he shot Woody Allen's new movie, "Blue Jasmine," with Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin; it opens in July. In each case, Cannavale said, he was hired because someone saw him in "Hat."

Many actors on a roll like this would be off to L.A., but Cannavale, 42, is a different breed. He has always lived in New York, partly so he has the option of doing theater but mostly because of his son, Jake, 17. Since Cannavale's divorce in 2004 from the screenwriter Jenny Lumet ("Rachel Getting Married"), Jake lives with him every other week.

So Cannavale is staying put. With his newfound clout, he can play a part he always wanted, Charlie Castle, the movie star with a dark secret, in Clifford Odets's "Big Knife," which opens April 16. Produced by the Roundabout Theater Company, it is the first Broadway revival of the play since its debut in 1949. Cannavale fell in love with it 15 years ago, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where he saw Kind in a production directed by Joanne Woodward. (Kind plays the same role, Hoff, the studio head, in this production.) When Kind auditioned for Woodward, Cannavale reminded him at breakfast, he was his reader, the up-and-coming nobody who takes a job running lines in the hope the director might hear him too. Kind looked blank. "He was at Joanne Woodward's apartment," Cannavale said, laughing. "He wasn't remembering me."

When he went to the men's room, Kind turned serious. "To have a friend like this, a guy who's so loyal, with a morality and a guy's ethos, he's like Clooney," he said. "You'd be shocked at how hard he works and how proud he is of being good."

I met Cannavale at his Upper West Side apartment one evening after his rehearsal. He is 6-2, long and lithe. His hair, some of it cropped, some of it hanging, is always on the move. What the cane was to Chaplin, the hair is to Cannavale; his hands are in it, on it, yanking, grabbing. At least it was clean.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: What the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Listened to When They Were Kids

Back in the early 2000s, Karen O had a crush on a lame dude. "For whatever reason at that point in my life I was like yeah. I was totally into it," she told me when I was reporting this weekend's article about her and her band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Out one night at the Cooler, a now-defunct venue in the Meatpacking district in New York, the guy was ignoring her, and she was drowning her sorrows when she saw Debbie Harry at the bar. "I go up to her and I'm like, 'Yeah, um, I'm in a band and sometimes I just feel like a girl in a boys world.' She says, 'Honey, just enjoy it while it lasts.'" At the time, Karen O, whose last name is Orzolek, was horrified. "It felt condescending." But she has a different take on it now. "She's right as rain . . . I am a girl in a boys world but . . . it doesn't really matter, just enjoy it!"

For years, Orzolek had been seeking advice — albeit more subtly, usually — from any number of rock icons. As a high-school student in New Jersey, the singer had one of those life-expanding friends, the fearless teenage punk who's plugged in to the counterculture before everyone else. This girl dragged her into New York City to see bands like Sonic Youth, Pavement, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, P J Harvey and the late '90s band, Jonathan Fire*Eater (whose members later formed the group Walkmen). Around the same time she also got into the high-pitched oddness of vocalists like Neil Young and Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum.

The guitarist for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Zinner, also cites Fire*Eater as an inspiration. Zinner is the type of guy (every band has one) who can sit in the back of a bar with journalists and discuss obscure 4AD singles for hours. But then he also loves Van Halen. While we were strolling through the Brooklyn Flea Market during the time when I was working on my story, Zinner stopped in his tracks when he saw a framed Teen Beat-style poster of Van Halen in full neon spandex glory. (He restrained himself from buying it.)

Brian Chase, the Yeah Yeah Yeah's drummer,  moved to New York after college with one goal in mind: play with the composer, multi-instrumentalist and all-around musician John Zorn. Instead, he joined the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and they all became rock stars.

Here are some tracks by artists who helped the Yeah Yeah Yeahs get to where they are.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: On a Cold Night in Brooklyn … a Daredevil Bike Race

If you were just about to compete in a fixed-gear bike race, in the dark, in the cold, on a course with some very sharp turns and 30 or so other competitors, your nerves would show, right? At the Red Hook Criterium last year, the photographer Benedict Evans decided to find out. "The idea," Evans, an avid cyclist himself, told me, "was to set up a kind of portable studio outdoors near the track, but it rained on the day, so I ended up renting the biggest U-Haul truck I could afford, covering the inside of it with black paper, driving it up next to the finish line and coaxing people inside it to be photographed. I figured that anyone willing to ride brakeless bikes around an intricate course in the dark of night would make for an interesting subject." You can see some of his portraits here, among them that of Dan Chabanov, a bike messenger who has won three of the five races held so far.

This year's event takes place at 9 p.m. tomorrow at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. The race consists of 24 laps that add up to 30 kilometers and takes about 45 minutes to complete. The competitors include amateur road and track enthusiasts, bike messengers and a few professional racers. The bikes themselves must all be track bikes and therefore do not have hand brakes. (There is also a 5K footrace that takes place on the same course, earlier in the evening.)

I'm no bike race aficionado, but by Lap 4 at last year's event I was hooked. Certainly the atmosphere is festive and sociable, which may have something to do with the event's unusual origins. David Trimble (shown above), the Crit's organizer and member of a family that has been racing for two generations, moved to Red Hook in 2008. Struck by the area's desolate streets, lack of traffic and policing, he set up a race among friends to celebrate his birthday. It was so popular, he did it again the following year. Five years later, he expects there will be roughly 5,000 spectators in attendance. It has also grown beyond Red Hook: Saturday's race is the first in a four-part series, with points accrued at each stop. The next three races will take place this year in Brooklyn (at the Navy Yard), Barcelona and Milan, where a champion will be crowned. Not a bad birthday party by any standards.

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Should It Matter That the Shooter at Oikos University Was Korean?

Richard Barnes for the New York Times

A makeshift memorial that appeared after seven people were killed by a gunman at Oikos University last April.

On April 2 last year, a 43-year-old former nursing student named One L. Goh walked into Oikos University in Oakland, Calif., with a .45-caliber handgun. He killed six people and wounded three others, then exited the building and shot and killed Tshering Bhutia, a former classmate, in the school's parking lot. Goh then climbed into Bhutia's car and drove to a Safeway in the nearby city of Alameda, where he ultimately surrendered to police.

Rex Features, via Associated Press

The booking photograph of One Goh from the Alameda County Sheriff's office.

Five days later, I went to see Goh at the Santa Rita jail in Dublin, Calif., 25 miles south of Oakland. The visitation area consists of a series of stalls equipped with a phone on either side of a glass partition. The prisoners take their spots before the doors open, so if you stand by one of the hallway windows, you can see rows of men waiting for their visitors. At a far window, an elderly Vietnamese woman waved fondly at her son. On a wooden bench near the check-in desk, two older men talked about how the word "correctional" meant that the prisoners were supposed to come out as better people. A young woman held an infant up to the window and cooed, "Say hello to Daddy." Two days after the shooting, I sent Goh a letter written in Korean explaining who I was and that I would be there on Saturday. Now as I waited, I routinely stood up to peek into those windows to see if he had shown up. He wasn't there.

A buzzer went off, and the heavy door to the visitation area swung open. I walked in with the other visitors, checking each stall, until I saw a dumpy Korean man with thick eyebrows and heavy jowls. He watched as I sat at his booth, but his face registered nothing. He stared ahead with dark, small eyes and waited for me to settle in my seat. When I reached for the receiver on my side of the glass, he picked up his end. I asked if he was One Goh. He said yes.

During the conversation that ensued, Goh repeatedly rubbed his face with the heel of his palm. On a couple of occasions, he appeared to be on the verge of tears. He said he had come down to the visitation area because he was expecting to see his father. He asked who I was. I told him — truthfully, though it was more complicated than this — that I was planning to write a book about school shootings and wanted to ask him about his life. In his measured, raspy voice, Goh said, "I have not seen my father since — " before trailing off into something inaudible. He said his lawyer had instructed him to not talk to anyone about the case. I asked him if he was sure. Goh nodded but didn't make a move to hang up the phone.

Then he began to talk. Early police reports never specified what happened after the shooting, when Goh went to the Safeway near the school, though there was agreement that he walked inside and asked to used the phone at the customer-service desk. I asked whom he called, and Goh said: "I called my father and told him that I had shot a lot of people. He told me to turn myself in. I went outside to try to wave at a police officer, but he didn't turn around, so I walked back inside and talked to the security guard."

After a pause, he said, "I know my father loves me, he just shows it in a different way." When I asked him to describe his father, Goh asked me about my nationality. I told him I was also Korean. He said, "You know, my father is a pretty typical Korean guy." I told him I knew what that meant. There's a shorthand among Korean immigrants, and as I sat across from One Goh, I tried not to think about the ease with which we had connected.

Goh told me that his relationship with his father was mostly nonexistent, but that he cooked dinner for him every Wednesday night. Then, with a look of great annoyance, he immediately changed his assessment. "You cannot find one unlucky thing in my childhood," he said. "I have been raised pretty good.

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Eat: Trinidad’s Chinese Fusion Cuisine

William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

This weekend's meal takes us to the bottom corner of Port of Spain, in Trinidad, where Kevin Yarna and his father, Pancho, spend Fridays serving Chinese-style chicken at Pancho's Snackette, near the modern rise of the National Library.

William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

Flavor in balance: lime, oyster sauce and Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce.

Chinese-style chicken is a dish you can find all over Trinidad and within the diaspora that has followed the nation's emergence from British rule. The skin is fried into a lacquered mahogany. The meat beneath it tastes of five-spice, ginger and soy and is generally accompanied by a hum of oyster sauce mixed with the zing of the pickled Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce that is seemingly omnipresent on the island's tables.

The dish pays faint, mongrelized homage to the Chinese indentured servants who came to Trinidad in the 19th century to cut cane and harvest cacao when the British abolished African slavery but still needed chattel to do their work. The Chinese cooked their own food when they weren't slaving. All Trinidad — not just Caribs and Africans but also, as in Derek Walcott's description of the population, "the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle" — savored the result. Each group eventually made the cooking its collective own.

Yarna told me that Chinese-style chicken is among his best-selling menu items and that it has been for most of the storied restaurant's 17 years. That turns out to be the case in many places the dish is served. At the restaurant Trini-Gul, in Brooklyn, Chinese-style chicken is sold mostly on weekends and favors only those who can get to the small dining room early in the day or who call ahead for a special order. It gets ramcram in there, as the Trinis say. The chicken goes fast.

At Pancho's as at Trini-Gul, the technique for cooking the dish is basically the same: a chicken is marinated in dark soy sauce and five-spice powder overnight, then deep-fried whole in a giant pot of oil flavored with sesame. The chicken comes in pieces on a plate, with sauce on the side. Home cooks, though, can achieve much the same effect by cutting the chicken up beforehand or by buying chicken thighs and legs, marinating the pieces and pan-frying them in a lot less oil. The result is crisp, hardly oily, with terrific flavor. It pairs amazingly well with fried rice and cold beer: a taste of the polyglot islands.

Fresh lime is crucial to your success. All across the Caribbean, cooks use lime juice to clean their poultry, and it offers a tartness in the marinade for this dish that helps cut the saltiness of the soy. Do not stint on the lime. And a good hot sauce is required for the finishing sauce: something bright with Scotch bonnets or habaneros, vinegar, a slight hint of mustard. Among the best is Matouk's Soca, from National Canners in Trinidad (it is sold sporadically at Fairway Market in New York and is always available online). Matouk's is the Tabasco of the Lesser Antilles, manufactured in the small northern town of Arima. It is less salty than Jamaican hot sauces, less mustardy than Barbadian, without the almost unpalatable fire of Guyanese varieties. Jeremy Matouk, the company's courtly and voluble president, invokes the wine lover's idea of terroir to describe it. He told me that Trinidad's peppers "taste of the island itself."

This is absolutely true of the sauce in the following recipe. The addition of a Scotch-bonnet sauce (choose your own, but make sure it is fruity in its fire, with a rich aftertaste) to the funky salinity of a commercial Chinese oyster sauce is revelatory, a culinary mash-up of the very first order. Slathered on the crisp chicken, it becomes visible poetry, a joyous product of survival under hard odds.

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The 6th Floor Blog: We Are What We Wear

A little while ago, members of the magazine's staff brought in their favorite T-shirts, and we asked readers to match shirt to personality type. Could you spot the Canadian figure skater's T-shirt? Did the long-sleeved shirt belong to the person who refuses to adopt Twitter?

Now, more or less prompted by just having learned that Hermès is selling a crocodile T-shirt for $91,500 — what does that say about someone? — we reveal the answers to our quiz.

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Of the nine T-shirts below, which belongs to the Iowa-born managing editor of the magazine? Which belongs to an athlete who owns a sailboat?

ANSWER: The T-shirt with Floppy the Dog (middle left) belongs to the Iowa-born managing editor of the magazine. ("Anyone from Iowa," he says, "should be able to spot the puppet host of the popular television program, 'The Floppy Show,' produced in Des Moines.") The blue shirt with mountains (top center) belongs to the athlete who owns a sailboat.

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Of the nine T-shirts below, which belongs to a former competitive figure skater from Canada? Which belongs to a reality-television junkie who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village? Which one belongs to a Latin dancer from Kentucky?

ANSWER: "Columbia Prep" (middle left) belongs to the reality-television junkie. The white shirt in the center belongs to the Canadian figure skater. The blue shirt with a cow (middle right) is the favorite of the Latin dancer from Kentucky.

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Of the nine T-shirts below, which belongs to a runner with an encyclopedic knowledge of music history? Which belongs to the yoga fanatic who refuses to get a Twitter handle?

ANSWER: The teal shirt with the dinosaur (top right) belongs to the yoga fanatic who refuses to get a Twitter handle. The black shirt with red, blue and yellow ovals (middle right) belongs to the runner with an encyclopedic knowledge of music history.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Mark Leyner on the Art of Being ‘Sufficiently Carnivalesque’

As part of its 60th anniversary issue, The Paris Review has a great, long interview with Mark Leyner, author of, most recently, "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack."

Here's just one highlight; Leyner on his writing process:

I love doing this more than anything in the world, but it's a sort of ghastly war waged against myself. This is how it's done: I bring myself to a pitch of crisis and hysteria, then perfect clarity and resolve about how to proceed, which is accompanied by the most exquisite euphoria and grandiosity, and which is then almost immediately followed by total abject disillusionment and self-loathing. And then it's on to the next sentence!

Last March, in conjunction with the initial release of his book, I interviewed Leyner about returning to fiction after a 15-year, self-imposed hiatus to a world that has been, to a certain extent, "Leynerized." (A term, and assertion, he strongly refutes in his Paris Review interview.) To read the whole interview, conducted by the estimable Sam Lipsyte, himself a writer who's no stranger to the carnivalesque, you'll need to purchase a copy of The Paris Review's 60th anniversary issue. It also features a long interview with the New York literary icon Deborah Eisenberg, a great new poem from Frederick Seidel, and is well worth the investment. If nothing else, you'll look great toting The Paris Review, should you ever wind up in a candid shot on this entertaining Web site.

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Should It Matter That the Shooter at Oikos University Was Korean?

Richard Barnes for the New York Times

A makeshift memorial that appeared after seven people were killed by a gunman at Oikos University last April.

On April 2 last year, a 43-year-old former nursing student named One L. Goh walked into Oikos University in Oakland, Calif., with a .45-caliber handgun. He killed six people and wounded three others, then exited the building and shot and killed Tshering Bhutia, a former classmate, in the school's parking lot. Goh then climbed into Bhutia's car and drove to a Safeway in the nearby city of Alameda, where he ultimately surrendered to police.

Rex Features, via Associated Press

The booking photograph of One Goh from the Alameda County Sheriff's office.

Five days later, I went to see Goh at the Santa Rita jail in Dublin, Calif., 25 miles south of Oakland. The visitation area consists of a series of stalls equipped with a phone on either side of a glass partition. The prisoners take their spots before the doors open, so if you stand by one of the hallway windows, you can see rows of men waiting for their visitors. At a far window, an elderly Vietnamese woman waved fondly at her son. On a wooden bench near the check-in desk, two older men talked about how the word "correctional" meant that the prisoners were supposed to come out as better people. A young woman held an infant up to the window and cooed, "Say hello to Daddy." Two days after the shooting, I sent Goh a letter written in Korean explaining who I was and that I would be there on Saturday. Now as I waited, I routinely stood up to peek into those windows to see if he had shown up. He wasn't there.

A buzzer went off, and the heavy door to the visitation area swung open. I walked in with the other visitors, checking each stall, until I saw a dumpy Korean man with thick eyebrows and heavy jowls. He watched as I sat at his booth, but his face registered nothing. He stared ahead with dark, small eyes and waited for me to settle in my seat. When I reached for the receiver on my side of the glass, he picked up his end. I asked if he was One Goh. He said yes.

During the conversation that ensued, Goh repeatedly rubbed his face with the heel of his palm. On a couple of occasions, he appeared to be on the verge of tears. He said he had come down to the visitation area because he was expecting to see his father. He asked who I was. I told him — truthfully, though it was more complicated than this — that I was planning to write a book about school shootings and wanted to ask him about his life. In his measured, raspy voice, Goh said, "I have not seen my father since — " before trailing off into something inaudible. He said his lawyer had instructed him to not talk to anyone about the case. I asked him if he was sure. Goh nodded but didn't make a move to hang up the phone.

Then he began to talk. Early police reports never specified what happened after the shooting, when Goh went to the Safeway near the school, though there was agreement that he walked inside and asked to used the phone at the customer-service desk. I asked whom he called, and Goh said: "I called my father and told him that I had shot a lot of people. He told me to turn myself in. I went outside to try to wave at a police officer, but he didn't turn around, so I walked back inside and talked to the security guard."

After a pause, he said, "I know my father loves me, he just shows it in a different way." When I asked him to describe his father, Goh asked me about my nationality. I told him I was also Korean. He said, "You know, my father is a pretty typical Korean guy." I told him I knew what that meant. There's a shorthand among Korean immigrants, and as I sat across from One Goh, I tried not to think about the ease with which we had connected.

Goh told me that his relationship with his father was mostly nonexistent, but that he cooked dinner for him every Wednesday night. Then, with a look of great annoyance, he immediately changed his assessment. "You cannot find one unlucky thing in my childhood," he said. "I have been raised pretty good.

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Eat: Trinidad’s Chinese Fusion Cuisine

William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

This weekend's meal takes us to the bottom corner of Port of Spain, in Trinidad, where Kevin Yarna and his father, Pancho, spend Fridays serving Chinese-style chicken at Pancho's Snackette, near the modern rise of the National Library.

William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

Flavor in balance: lime, oyster sauce and Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce.

Chinese-style chicken is a dish you can find all over Trinidad and within the diaspora that has followed the nation's emergence from British rule. The skin is fried into a lacquered mahogany. The meat beneath it tastes of five-spice, ginger and soy and is generally accompanied by a hum of oyster sauce mixed with the zing of the pickled Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce that is seemingly omnipresent on the island's tables.

The dish pays faint, mongrelized homage to the Chinese indentured servants who came to Trinidad in the 19th century to cut cane and harvest cacao when the British abolished African slavery but still needed chattel to do their work. The Chinese cooked their own food when they weren't slaving. All Trinidad — not just Caribs and Africans but also, as in Derek Walcott's description of the population, "the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle" — savored the result. Each group eventually made the cooking its collective own.

Yarna told me that Chinese-style chicken is among his best-selling menu items and that it has been for most of the storied restaurant's 17 years. That turns out to be the case in many places the dish is served. At the restaurant Trini-Gul, in Brooklyn, Chinese-style chicken is sold mostly on weekends and favors only those who can get to the small dining room early in the day or who call ahead for a special order. It gets ramcram in there, as the Trinis say. The chicken goes fast.

At Pancho's as at Trini-Gul, the technique for cooking the dish is basically the same: a chicken is marinated in dark soy sauce and five-spice powder overnight, then deep-fried whole in a giant pot of oil flavored with sesame. The chicken comes in pieces on a plate, with sauce on the side. Home cooks, though, can achieve much the same effect by cutting the chicken up beforehand or by buying chicken thighs and legs, marinating the pieces and pan-frying them in a lot less oil. The result is crisp, hardly oily, with terrific flavor. It pairs amazingly well with fried rice and cold beer: a taste of the polyglot islands.

Fresh lime is crucial to your success. All across the Caribbean, cooks use lime juice to clean their poultry, and it offers a tartness in the marinade for this dish that helps cut the saltiness of the soy. Do not stint on the lime. And a good hot sauce is required for the finishing sauce: something bright with Scotch bonnets or habaneros, vinegar, a slight hint of mustard. Among the best is Matouk's Soca, from National Canners in Trinidad (it is sold sporadically at Fairway Market in New York and is always available online). Matouk's is the Tabasco of the Lesser Antilles, manufactured in the small northern town of Arima. It is less salty than Jamaican hot sauces, less mustardy than Barbadian, without the almost unpalatable fire of Guyanese varieties. Jeremy Matouk, the company's courtly and voluble president, invokes the wine lover's idea of terroir to describe it. He told me that Trinidad's peppers "taste of the island itself."

This is absolutely true of the sauce in the following recipe. The addition of a Scotch-bonnet sauce (choose your own, but make sure it is fruity in its fire, with a rich aftertaste) to the funky salinity of a commercial Chinese oyster sauce is revelatory, a culinary mash-up of the very first order. Slathered on the crisp chicken, it becomes visible poetry, a joyous product of survival under hard odds.

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Becoming the All-Terrain Human

Levon Biss for The New York Times

Kilian Jornet, who has won dozens of mountain footraces up to 100 miles in length and six world titles in Skyrunning.

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe's roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex'd climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he'd just won the local turkey trot.

Levon Biss for The New York Times

Jornet "is not normal," his mother says. "My mission is to make Kilian tired. Always, I was tired, but Kilian, no."

Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters.

So what's next when you're 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world's most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what's possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn't been skied before in winter.

But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago, Jornet watched as his hero and friend Stéphane Brosse died in the mountains. Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?

Chamonix, France, is a resort town wedged into a narrow valley at the foot of Mont Blanc, just over an hour's drive southeast of Geneva. For those who adore high mountains, the place is hallowed. The Rue du Docteur Paccard is named for one of the first men to ascend Mont Blanc, in 1786; millionaires are tolerated, but mountain men are revered. The valley is Jornet's home for the few months each year when he is not traveling. I met him there on a stormy morning in December, when he drove his dented Peugeot van into a parking lot at the edge of town, stepped out and offered a shy handshake. He is slight and unremarkable in the deceptive way of a Tour de France cyclist — he's 5-foot-6 and 125 pounds — with the burnished complexion of years spent above the tree line and a thatch of black hair that, when sprung from a ski hat, has a slightly blendered look.

As we drove to and from Valle d'Aosta in Italy, where he would train that day, Jornet told me in soft-spoken English (one of five languages­ he speaks) how he first stunned the small world of elite ultrarunning. It happened at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, the most competitive ultrarunning event outside the United States. (An "ultra" is any race longer than a marathon.) In 2008, when he was 20, Jornet defeated a field that included Scott Jurek, perhaps the sport's most well known star, while setting a record for the 104-mile course around the Mont Blanc massif (which happens to include 31,500 feet of uphill climbing, or the equivalent of 25 trips to the top of the Empire State Building). "It was a revelation and a coronation at once," Runner's World magazine later wrote. Then Jornet won again the next year (and again in 2011).

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 26, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of time it takes for Kilian Jornet Burgada to run a short, vertical kilometer mountain race. It is about a half-hour, not two hours.

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Mark Bittman and Sam Sifton’s East-Over Feast

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The 6th Floor Blog: Write a Short Story With Kate Atkinson!

1:39 p.m. | Updated Read the full story below.

In Sunday's magazine, Sarah Lyall writes about Kate Atkinson, a novelist whose "true genius," Lyall writes, is structure: "Her books wend forward and backward, follow multiple stories from multiple points of view, throw dozens of balls up in the air — but always conclude with loose ends tied up, so that everything makes sense."

We wanted to try some wending of our own, with Atkinson as the guide, so we invited you to join us in a game of Exquisite Corpse. Here's how it worked: Kate Atkinson started off our story at 11 a.m. with a single sentence, which we tweeted from @NYTmag using the hashtag #NYTMagStory. Readers could suggest the next sentence on Twitter using the same hashtag, and could continue refreshing this post to see the most recent sentence.

Here's a slightly edited version of what we came up with, complete with a closing line from our culture editor, Adam Sternbergh.

[View the story "A Story By Kate Atkinson and Twitter" on Storify]

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The 6th Floor Blog: Write a Short Story With Kate Atkinson!

1:39 p.m. | Updated Read the full story below.

In Sunday's magazine, Sarah Lyall writes about Kate Atkinson, a novelist whose "true genius," Lyall writes, is structure: "Her books wend forward and backward, follow multiple stories from multiple points of view, throw dozens of balls up in the air — but always conclude with loose ends tied up, so that everything makes sense."

We wanted to try some wending of our own, with Atkinson as the guide, so we invited you to join us in a game of Exquisite Corpse. Here's how it worked: Kate Atkinson started off our story at 11 a.m. with a single sentence, which we tweeted from @NYTmag using the hashtag #NYTMagStory. Readers could suggest the next sentence on Twitter using the same hashtag, and could continue refreshing this post to see the most recent sentence.

Here's a slightly edited version of what we came up with, complete with a closing line from our culture editor, Adam Sternbergh.

[View the story "A Story By Kate Atkinson and Twitter" on Storify]

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The 6th Floor Blog: Channing Tatum Has The Most Anagram-able Name In Hollywood

As a recurring bonus to the Riff essay, we sporadically present Five-Ku: five haiku poems about a current celebrity or cultural phenomenon. (Past examples include haikus about Susan Sarandon, Russell Crowe and classic horror films.)

This week in Five-Ku, we present five short poems on the career of Channing Tatum. During the extensive research and reporting phase of this project, however, we made an important discovery: Channing Tatum's name is delightfully, and quite possibly infinitely, anagrammable.

So while our five haikus started out relatively conventionally, they were quickly colonized by the parade of irresistible "Channing Tatum" anagrams:

First rule of Tatum:
Shorter the hair, better the
Movie. Bank on it.

His success foretold?
''Channing Tatum'' anagram
For ''Acting manhunt.''

Then again, also
For ''Thin-act gunman.'' As well
as ''Macing that nun.''

And ''Manic gnat hunt.''
And ''Chanting, am nut.'' O.K.,
Enough anagrams.

Those ''Magic Mike'' abs —
Sorry — can't resist one more.
Here: ''Cunning? Am that.''

There are, in fact, even more excellent and resonant anagrams — or, as you might call them, channingrams — you can generate from Channing Tatum: for example, "Gunman can't hit." Or "Can't, Ma — hunting." Or "Hangman cut tin." Or "Man hunting cat." Or "Tang than cumin." Or "Cunning at math." Or "Giant nun match." Or "Mutt-canning. Ha!"

(This may be a good time to confess that all of these anagrams were discovered through the indispensable Internet Anagram Server, the name of which is also, ingeniously, an anagram for I, Rearrangement Servant.)

But there was one eerily appropriate anagram that we didn't include in our Five-Ku, but which is worth reproducing here. First, some back story:

WARNING: FAINT-OF-HEART, LOOK AWAY!

All right then.

An oft-told story by Tatum recounts the time, during the filming of "The Eagle," when a production assistant mistakenly poured boiling water over him while he stood in a river wearing a wet suit. The water pooled, as water does, and unfortunately resulted in Tatum's manhood being scalded. (For the gorier details, see this article or this article. Or this one.) Tatum has always joked about it and claimed he survived the incident with no lingering aftereffects.

But can we really be sure? To the anagram generator!

This telling anagram, presented here in haiku form, would seem to definitively corroborate his story:

Filming "The Eagle,"
Boiling water blanched privates.
But: "Hung man intact."

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It’s the Economy: Do Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to spirit packets of oyster crackers from restaurants. She unwrapped gifts meticulously, peeling back the tape with her nails so that she could reuse the paper. She also stockpiled so many coupon-bought cans that she probably could have had her own show on TLC.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. The millennials have developed an obsession with money.

2. Partly because they don't have any.

3. Will the income gap become a wealth gap?

These habits, judging by both anecdote and literature, were generational. My grandmother was born in 1917 and entered the work force during the Great Depression. I've been thinking of her generation — the one that saved rather than spent, preserved rather than squandered — a lot lately. In the past year or so, data have come in regarding how my own generation, often called Generation Y, or the millennials, has adapted to our once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis — the one that battered career prospects, drove hundreds of thousands into the shelter of schools or parents' basements and left hundreds of thousands of others in continual underemployment. And some of that early research suggests that we, too, have developed our own Depression-era fixation with money.

The millennials have developed a reputation for a certain materialism. In a Pew Research Center survey in which different generations were asked what made them unique, baby boomers responded with qualities like "work ethic"; millennials offered "clothes." But, according to new data, even though the recession is over, this generation is not looking to gorge; instead, they are the kind of hungry that cannot stop thinking about food. "Call it materialism if you want," said Neil Howe, an author of the 1991 book "Generations." It seems more like financial melancholy. "They look at the house their parents live in and say, 'I could work for 100 years and I couldn't afford this place,' " Howe said. "If that doesn't make you focus on money, what would? Millennials have a very conventional notion of the American dream — a spouse, a house, a kid — but it is not going to be easy for them to get those things."

This condition is becoming particularly severe for the group that economists call younger millennials: the young adults who entered the job market in the wake of the recession, a period in which the unemployment rate among 20- to 24-year-olds reached 17 percent, when graduate school competition grew more fierce and credit standards tightened. Many also saw their parents struggle through a pay cut, a job loss or another economic disruption during the recession.

These troubles, many economists fear, left serious scars, and not just psychic ones. Now that the economy has entered a steady but slow recovery, younger millennials wonder if they can make up that gap. Lisa Kahn, a labor economist at the Yale School of Management, studied the earnings of men who left college and joined the work force during the deep recession of the early 1980s. Unsurprisingly, she found that the higher the unemployment rate upon graduation, the less graduates earned right out of school. But those workers never really caught up. "The effects were still present 15 or 20 years later," she said. "They never made that money back."

Kahn worries that the same pattern is repeating itself. And new research from the Urban Institute augurs that this emerging income gap is compounding into a wealth gap. The institute's research shows that even as the country has grown richer, Generations X and Y, meaning people up to about age 40, have amassed less wealth than their parents had when they were young. The average net worth of someone 29 to 37 has fallen 21 percent since 1983; the average net worth of someone 56 to 64 has more than doubled. Thirty or 40 years from now, young millennials might face shakier retirements than their parents. For the first time in modern memory, a whole generation might not prove wealthier than the one that preceded it.

Annie Lowrey is an economics reporter for The Times. Adam Davidson is off this week.

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Innovation: Who Made Spring Break?

Photographs by Patrick Ward/Corbis (top); Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis (right); Claudio Vargas/AFP/Getty Images (bottom)

In 1958, Glendon Swarthout, an English professor at Michigan State University, overheard his students buzzing about their Easter-break trip to Fort Lauderdale. In that more-ecumenical era, students typically shuttled home to attend church services with their parents, but now word was spreading of another kind of spring break. Swarthout decided to tag along so that he could observe the rituals (pool-hopping, pith helmets, beatnik jazz) and capture the lingo ("beaucoup beers," "schizoid," "babyroo"). Upon his return, he dashed off a novel about coeds who cruise the beach and "play house" with boys from other colleges — a 1950s version of "Girls Gone Wild." In a nod to the Easter season, he called his book "Unholy Spring," but Hollywood executives persuaded him to change the title to "Where the Boys Are." The result was a blockbuster book that was spun off into a movie — marketed with the phrase "spring vacation" — as well as a Connie Francis song.

"That was where life imitated art," says John Laurie, a business consultant at the Kauffman Foundation, who wrote his dissertation on the history and economics of spring break. According to Laurie, after the movie came out in 1960, there were suddenly 50,000 (instead of 20,000) students going to Florida to experience the spring break they'd seen on-screen. By the mid-1980s, it was hundreds of thousands. MTV hosted its first concert at Daytona Beach in 1986, televising an orgy of beachside bikini contests, hair gel and smooth pecs. "MTV brought in major advertisers," Laurie says. The network also created the idea that the party could happen in any location with bodacious tanning opportunities.

As a college student in the 1990s, Laurie became something of a connoisseur of the Easter blowouts: "My first spring break was at Daytona Beach," he says. "My last one was Panama City Beach, Fla., which was then the spring-break capital of the world." Even as he marveled at the town gone wild, he was gripped by its bittersweetness. "After college, you can't go to spring break anymore. It's no longer socially acceptable. When it's done, it's done, and — at least for you — it's not coming back."

BEACH BARS

Sheriff Frank McKeithen of Bay County, Fla., has created a spring-break jail.

Why bring the jail down to the beach? Our regular jail is about 25 miles from Panama City Beach. We had vans that would haul people off. Unfortunately, the folks were passing out, throwing up and secreting other bodily fluids. Here, they can have fresh air, and if they're throwing up, we can wash it out.

Has anyone else set up a beach jail since you did this last year? Not that I know of. What we've built looks like two dog kennels with rubber flooring. You're talking about two million people coming through our area in a 47-day period. And they did not come to go to church.

What happens to the kids after they're booked? Well, we've started a spring-break court this year. If they're charged with misdemeanors, then the judge will assign them some hours of community service. It's humiliating for the kids when all their friends are at the bar and they're beside the road picking up trash.

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Kate Atkinson’s ‘Groundhog Day’ Fiction

Gareth McConnell for The New York Times

Kate Atkinson

Imagine having the gift (or the curse) of continually dying and being reborn, so that you relive segments of your life again and again, differently each time, going down various paths and smoothing out rough areas until you get it right and can move on. Imagine, too, that you are not conscious that this is happening, but experience it as intermittent déjà vu, a sometimes-inchoate dread, an inexplicable compulsion at sudden moments to do one thing rather than another.

Kate Atkinson's Shrewdest Plot Tricks

A brief history of the author's narrative schemes, from time travel to dreaming up an entire novel from the title of a favorite Dickinson poem.

This is not an original artistic conceit, obviously. A century ago, the book "Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" depicted a young man who is given a chance to relive his life and correct his mistakes in 1902 Moscow. And in "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray is forced to repeat the same wretched day, and listen to the same wretched Sonny and Cher song, in Punxsutawney, Pa., until he becomes a better person and wins over Andie MacDowell. But in "Life After Life," her eighth and latest novel, the British writer Kate Atkinson has taken these notions — what if practice really did make perfect, and what if we really could play out multiple alternate futures — and put them through the Magimix, pumped them full of helium, added some degrees of difficulty and produced an audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility.

Atkinson's work suffers from a bit of brand confusion, which partly explains why it hasn't caught on in the U.S. as it has in Britain. She does not write about vampires or werewolves or women exploring their inner goddesses with a little sadomasochistic sex. Nor does she continually produce variations on a theme or even variations within a genre. Her writing is funny and quirky and sharp and sad — calamity laced with humor — and full of quietly heroic characters who offer knowing Lorrie Moore-esque parenthetical asides. ("I think in brackets; I do my own asides to myself," Atkinson said.) She writes critically admired family sagas that are not really family sagas; crime novels that are not really crime novels; and now, in "Life After Life," to be published in the U.S. next month, a science-fiction novel, in the loosest possible sense, that is nothing of the sort.

Atkinson's true genius is structure. Her books wend forward and backward, follow multiple stories from multiple points of view, throw dozens of balls up in the air — but always conclude with loose ends tied up, so that everything makes sense. Her first novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," published in 1995, intersperses the linear narrative of the heroine's life with a series of chapter-long explanatory "footnotes" that fill in the back stories of various glancingly mentioned relations and events, painting an intense portrait of a big, messy British family in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. The book seemingly came from nowhere to win a major literary prize in London, instantly establishing Atkinson as a singular voice while generating grumbling among more established (male) writers. The novel also displayed what have become staples of her work: big complicated plots and joyful experimentation with form. One of Atkinson's novels has three different beginnings. Another, set over three days, has four main characters. A protagonist in another spends a good portion of the book in a coma.

Atkinson cannot really articulate how she creates these elaborate structures. Although she used a Moleskin storyboard to keep track of the acrobatic chronology in "Life After Life," she generally does not formally map out her plots. Instead, many of her books start as ideas, or as challenges to herself — characters or thoughts that dare her to put them in stories. Sometimes they begin with the title itself, as in "Started Early, Took My Dog" (2011), which came from an Emily Dickinson poem and which required only that she include a dog and make her hero a Dickinson fan. With "Life After Life," Atkinson knew she wanted to write about the London Blitz, but she also wanted to experiment with a protagonist who constantly dies and is reborn, and she wanted to examine whether someone in that predicament could actually alter the course of history. Could her heroine — brave, tragic Ursula Todd, born in 1910 to an ordinary family in an ordinary English county — somehow stop World War II?

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Chip Brown on Peter Gelb and Opera Nuttiness

Chip Brown, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of this week's cover story about Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Brown last wrote for the magazine about the oil boom in North Dakota.

Are you an opera nut of the type you describe in your story?

Good God, no! I am trying to cut back on my personality disorders. However, I was exposed as a kid to the extreme emotions opera can elicit, thanks to my mother, who for many years informed her children that when she died we were to scatter her ashes at the Met — where, exactly, it was never clear, maybe that little glade between the Met and the Henry Moore sculpture. Every Saturday afternoon she would get into her wedding dress and spend three hours cathartically weeping over the live Texaco broadcasts from the Met of operas like "La Bohème" and "Rosenkavalier." I realize now that as she sat by the small white radio in the study, it probably wasn't her wedding dress she was wearing, though for many years I was sure it was. And it probably wasn't the tragic course of life that was making her weep, because there was nothing particularly exceptional about a young mother who gives up a career in N.Y.C. in the 1950s, moves to the suburbs, has a bunch of kids and can no longer fit into her wedding dress. I'm still of two minds about those Saturday-afternoon appointments she kept with her radio. On one hand, it does seem that the nature and genius of opera is to make our circumstances seem larger and more significant, more beautiful, more tragic than they really are. On the other hand, maybe I got it all wrong, and that what those broadcasts were doing in essence was the religious act of calling the divine out of the clouds and shunting it onto the radio.

The story captures the excitement of being backstage. If Gelb isn't an opera nut, is that why he is in it, for the adrenaline?

While not an opera nut, in the conventional sense of the word, he does love the art of staging operas, which includes everything from getting the best singers and musicians to making sure there is a future for the art form. Running the Met, he has said many times, was his "dream job." Grand opera is an art and a business, and it takes a certain virtuosity to succeed in both domains. The Met is like a giant Rubik's Cube, and if he's not in it for the adrenaline per se, I think he is in it for the adventure of getting all the parts lined up perfectly, of pulling off the formidable challenge of getting an opera going six nights a week, of guiding this enormous and influential performing arts organization into the future.

There must be some very interesting people around Gelb. Did you interview any or get a sense of anyone else particularly memorable at the Met?

I did get a chance to talk to Gelb's mentor, Ronald Wilford, the principal figure at Columbia Artists Management, who hired Gelb away from the Boston Symphony. In a book, Wilford was famously called "the man who killed classical music." I was wondering how I might bring up the charge, and before I got a word out, he said: "I was once called the man who killed classical music. You can't kill classical music — I tried!" His point was that there were thousands of people in China streaming into villages and cities eager to become classical pianists. Wilford apparently doesn't give a lot of interviews, and I was excited when he said to come over to his office on Broadway, but the experience of interviewing him seemed to me the equivalent of trying to catch a great knuckleball pitcher with an opera glove.

You compare Gelb's job to that of a Yankees manager, but could anyone really manage to make the Met as central to the city as the Yankees?

I think the Met job is comparable to managing the Yankees only in the sense that these are iconic positions with storied histories — exalted jobs in an exalted city. Obviously the manager of each institution uses a completely different method of evaluating the success of the performers in their charge. Opera singers don't have on-base percentages or earned-run averages. Opera companies don't have quantifiable win-loss records. Wins and losses are based on a complex amalgamation of factors from critical opinion to ticket sales. I can't imagine why any opera impresarios wouldn't want to make the Met as central to the life of the city as the Yankees are, but by the same measure that seems an awfully tall order when you consider the cultural barriers to classical music in America. Millions of dollars are poured into sports programs while music and arts education has been virtually been eliminated from most public-school curriculums. Kids are exposed to sports in a way they are not to music and art.

What was it like to profile someone who once worked very successfully in public relations?

Peter Gelb has spent many hours "getting press" for his clients. He knows how journalists work, or thinks he does. It's a fallacy that journalists all work in the same way. Like figure skaters, there are certain compulsory routines they have to complete, but after that, the program is wide open and if you want to mix a harmonica solo in with the triple axels it's up to you and the structure of the story. At one point Gelb suggested that I was employing the "Columbo technique," which he said his father, a former New York Times managing editor, Arthur Gelb, had told him about. The Columbo technique, in case you aren't familiar with it, is based on the old Peter Falk detective show "Columbo." It entails showing up at an interview in a general state of dishevelment, and asking dumb, obvious questions that give the person you are interviewing the impression that you haven't prepared for the interview and are a crazy clod who doesn't know anything about the case in question. Of course, the payoff is that Columbo was crazy like a fox. But if you are practicing the Columbo, technique you are obliged to insist that you are not doing anything of the sort and that you truly don't know anything about the subject. In my case since the subject was opera, it was easy to swear to the authenticity of my ignorance.

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Reply All | Letters: The 3.10.13 Issue

I was a real allergy skeptic until my own daughter experienced a life-threatening reaction to a cashew bar. More than a year later, a combination of care and luck has kept her anaphylaxis free. Of course, I was excited to read about a possible treatment for her in your magazine. But I am frustrated that researchers aren't doing more to try to determine what is causing this epidemic rise in severe allergic reactions. I worry that the focus on a cure dooms us to have more allergic kids rather than stopping the problem where it starts. AMANDA COOPER, Alameda, Calif.

Melanie Thernstrom wrote, "While food allergies cost an estimated $500 million a year, Congress recently appropriated only $28 million a year for research (compared with, say, $1 billion for diabetes and $5 billion for cancer)." Congress appropriated a research budget for allergies, however, that is 5.6 percent of the total economic cost. The budgets for diabetes and cancer only amount to 0.4 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. BRIAN HUNT, Wheaton, Ill., posted on nytimes.com

THE PROFESSOR, THE MODEL AND THE SUITCASE FULL OF TROUBLE

You meet bikini model online and she asks you to fly an empty suitcase from Bolivia to Europe. What can go wrong? @ThankUAndGnite, via Twitter

Did the professor go through with the scheme because he believed his online lover was real and that this was a task to prove his worth? Maybe he thought he could use his appearance as an aloof nerd to make the case that he "accidentally" smuggled drugs. He's retelling this story even after it has failed in court, which seems to indicate that he actually was bamboozled. And yet what about those text messages? What about those days in the airport, waiting for the e-ticket to Brussels? He was never suspicious about the bag? Even the idiots in "Dumb and Dumber" knew the bag was cursed. DAN NGUYEN, on news.ycombinator.com

I've known Paul Frampton for more than 30 years. He's decent and hard-working. I never thought he had an exaggerated opinion of himself. I have a great deal of respect for him, far more respect than I have for the D.E.A. KEVIN CAHILL, PH.D., Professor of physics and astronomy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Contrary to the implication in the article written about me, the behavior exhibited by both the lawyers and judges in my case was thoroughly professional and exemplary in all respects. The lawyers were able to prove my health was deteriorating in prison and probably saved my life by their work. While I admit that I showed bad judgment by checking in a bag belonging to someone else, I had no suspicion or knowledge that it contained illegal substances. PAUL FRAMPTON, Buenos Aires

NORA EPHRON'S FINAL ACT

Our 39-year-old son has acute myeloid leukemia, just as Nora Ephron did. Jacob Bernstein's moving reflection on his mother's illness brought not hope, but a companionship of shared experience — in this case the arbitrariness of this disease. Good writing can't outsmart leukemia, but it can keep us connected to life as we have it and remember it. JANET ZANDY, Rochester

This article provides an unparalleled, as of yet, glimpse into Ephron's mentality regarding her illness. It serves as a rebuttal to Frank Rich's New York magazine piece decrying the way in which those in Ephron's closest circles, including Rich, were finally told of the writer's illness: in a phone call from Jacob Bernstein, a day or two before she died. Bernstein calls those conversations "strangely beautiful," noting only that the longtime friends on the other end of the line "were startled and confused, but gracious." . . . Bernstein's essay reveals a devoted and admiring son coming to terms with the death of his larger-than-life, seemingly indomitable mother. STEPHANIE BUTNICK, on the Scroll blog, on tabletmag.com

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Innovation: Who Made Spring Break?

Photographs by Patrick Ward/Corbis (top); Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis (right); Claudio Vargas/AFP/Getty Images (bottom)

In 1958, Glendon Swarthout, an English professor at Michigan State University, overheard his students buzzing about their Easter-break trip to Fort Lauderdale. In that more-ecumenical era, students typically shuttled home to attend church services with their parents, but now word was spreading of another kind of spring break. Swarthout decided to tag along so that he could observe the rituals (pool-hopping, pith helmets, beatnik jazz) and capture the lingo ("beaucoup beers," "schizoid," "babyroo"). Upon his return, he dashed off a novel about coeds who cruise the beach and "play house" with boys from other colleges — a 1950s version of "Girls Gone Wild." In a nod to the Easter season, he called his book "Unholy Spring," but Hollywood executives persuaded him to change the title to "Where the Boys Are." The result was a blockbuster book that was spun off into a movie — marketed with the phrase "spring vacation" — as well as a Connie Francis song.

"That was where life imitated art," says John Laurie, a business consultant at the Kauffman Foundation, who wrote his dissertation on the history and economics of spring break. According to Laurie, after the movie came out in 1960, there were suddenly 50,000 (instead of 20,000) students going to Florida to experience the spring break they'd seen on-screen. By the mid-1980s, it was hundreds of thousands. MTV hosted its first concert at Daytona Beach in 1986, televising an orgy of beachside bikini contests, hair gel and smooth pecs. "MTV brought in major advertisers," Laurie says. The network also created the idea that the party could happen in any location with bodacious tanning opportunities.

As a college student in the 1990s, Laurie became something of a connoisseur of the Easter blowouts: "My first spring break was at Daytona Beach," he says. "My last one was Panama City Beach, Fla., which was then the spring-break capital of the world." Even as he marveled at the town gone wild, he was gripped by its bittersweetness. "After college, you can't go to spring break anymore. It's no longer socially acceptable. When it's done, it's done, and — at least for you — it's not coming back."

BEACH BARS

Sheriff Frank McKeithen of Bay County, Fla., has created a spring-break jail.

Why bring the jail down to the beach? Our regular jail is about 25 miles from Panama City Beach. We had vans that would haul people off. Unfortunately, the folks were passing out, throwing up and secreting other bodily fluids. Here, they can have fresh air, and if they're throwing up, we can wash it out.

Has anyone else set up a beach jail since you did this last year? Not that I know of. What we've built looks like two dog kennels with rubber flooring. You're talking about two million people coming through our area in a 47-day period. And they did not come to go to church.

What happens to the kids after they're booked? Well, we've started a spring-break court this year. If they're charged with misdemeanors, then the judge will assign them some hours of community service. It's humiliating for the kids when all their friends are at the bar and they're beside the road picking up trash.

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Kate Atkinson’s ‘Groundhog Day’ Fiction

Gareth McConnell for The New York Times

Kate Atkinson

Imagine having the gift (or the curse) of continually dying and being reborn, so that you relive segments of your life again and again, differently each time, going down various paths and smoothing out rough areas until you get it right and can move on. Imagine, too, that you are not conscious that this is happening, but experience it as intermittent déjà vu, a sometimes-inchoate dread, an inexplicable compulsion at sudden moments to do one thing rather than another.

Kate Atkinson's Shrewdest Plot Tricks

A brief history of the author's narrative schemes, from time travel to dreaming up an entire novel from the title of a favorite Dickinson poem.

This is not an original artistic conceit, obviously. A century ago, the book "Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" depicted a young man who is given a chance to relive his life and correct his mistakes in 1902 Moscow. And in "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray is forced to repeat the same wretched day, and listen to the same wretched Sonny and Cher song, in Punxsutawney, Pa., until he becomes a better person and wins over Andie MacDowell. But in "Life After Life," her eighth and latest novel, the British writer Kate Atkinson has taken these notions — what if practice really did make perfect, and what if we really could play out multiple alternate futures — and put them through the Magimix, pumped them full of helium, added some degrees of difficulty and produced an audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility.

Atkinson's work suffers from a bit of brand confusion, which partly explains why it hasn't caught on in the U.S. as it has in Britain. She does not write about vampires or werewolves or women exploring their inner goddesses with a little sadomasochistic sex. Nor does she continually produce variations on a theme or even variations within a genre. Her writing is funny and quirky and sharp and sad — calamity laced with humor — and full of quietly heroic characters who offer knowing Lorrie Moore-esque parenthetical asides. ("I think in brackets; I do my own asides to myself," Atkinson said.) She writes critically admired family sagas that are not really family sagas; crime novels that are not really crime novels; and now, in "Life After Life," to be published in the U.S. next month, a science-fiction novel, in the loosest possible sense, that is nothing of the sort.

Atkinson's true genius is structure. Her books wend forward and backward, follow multiple stories from multiple points of view, throw dozens of balls up in the air — but always conclude with loose ends tied up, so that everything makes sense. Her first novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," published in 1995, intersperses the linear narrative of the heroine's life with a series of chapter-long explanatory "footnotes" that fill in the back stories of various glancingly mentioned relations and events, painting an intense portrait of a big, messy British family in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. The book seemingly came from nowhere to win a major literary prize in London, instantly establishing Atkinson as a singular voice while generating grumbling among more established (male) writers. The novel also displayed what have become staples of her work: big complicated plots and joyful experimentation with form. One of Atkinson's novels has three different beginnings. Another, set over three days, has four main characters. A protagonist in another spends a good portion of the book in a coma.

Atkinson cannot really articulate how she creates these elaborate structures. Although she used a Moleskin storyboard to keep track of the acrobatic chronology in "Life After Life," she generally does not formally map out her plots. Instead, many of her books start as ideas, or as challenges to herself — characters or thoughts that dare her to put them in stories. Sometimes they begin with the title itself, as in "Started Early, Took My Dog" (2011), which came from an Emily Dickinson poem and which required only that she include a dog and make her hero a Dickinson fan. With "Life After Life," Atkinson knew she wanted to write about the London Blitz, but she also wanted to experiment with a protagonist who constantly dies and is reborn, and she wanted to examine whether someone in that predicament could actually alter the course of history. Could her heroine — brave, tragic Ursula Todd, born in 1910 to an ordinary family in an ordinary English county — somehow stop World War II?

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Reply All | Letters: The 3.10.13 Issue

I was a real allergy skeptic until my own daughter experienced a life-threatening reaction to a cashew bar. More than a year later, a combination of care and luck has kept her anaphylaxis free. Of course, I was excited to read about a possible treatment for her in your magazine. But I am frustrated that researchers aren't doing more to try to determine what is causing this epidemic rise in severe allergic reactions. I worry that the focus on a cure dooms us to have more allergic kids rather than stopping the problem where it starts. AMANDA COOPER, Alameda, Calif.

Melanie Thernstrom wrote, "While food allergies cost an estimated $500 million a year, Congress recently appropriated only $28 million a year for research (compared with, say, $1 billion for diabetes and $5 billion for cancer)." Congress appropriated a research budget for allergies, however, that is 5.6 percent of the total economic cost. The budgets for diabetes and cancer only amount to 0.4 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. BRIAN HUNT, Wheaton, Ill., posted on nytimes.com

THE PROFESSOR, THE MODEL AND THE SUITCASE FULL OF TROUBLE

You meet bikini model online and she asks you to fly an empty suitcase from Bolivia to Europe. What can go wrong? @ThankUAndGnite, via Twitter

Did the professor go through with the scheme because he believed his online lover was real and that this was a task to prove his worth? Maybe he thought he could use his appearance as an aloof nerd to make the case that he "accidentally" smuggled drugs. He's retelling this story even after it has failed in court, which seems to indicate that he actually was bamboozled. And yet what about those text messages? What about those days in the airport, waiting for the e-ticket to Brussels? He was never suspicious about the bag? Even the idiots in "Dumb and Dumber" knew the bag was cursed. DAN NGUYEN, on news.ycombinator.com

I've known Paul Frampton for more than 30 years. He's decent and hard-working. I never thought he had an exaggerated opinion of himself. I have a great deal of respect for him, far more respect than I have for the D.E.A. KEVIN CAHILL, PH.D., Professor of physics and astronomy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Contrary to the implication in the article written about me, the behavior exhibited by both the lawyers and judges in my case was thoroughly professional and exemplary in all respects. The lawyers were able to prove my health was deteriorating in prison and probably saved my life by their work. While I admit that I showed bad judgment by checking in a bag belonging to someone else, I had no suspicion or knowledge that it contained illegal substances. PAUL FRAMPTON, Buenos Aires

NORA EPHRON'S FINAL ACT

Our 39-year-old son has acute myeloid leukemia, just as Nora Ephron did. Jacob Bernstein's moving reflection on his mother's illness brought not hope, but a companionship of shared experience — in this case the arbitrariness of this disease. Good writing can't outsmart leukemia, but it can keep us connected to life as we have it and remember it. JANET ZANDY, Rochester

This article provides an unparalleled, as of yet, glimpse into Ephron's mentality regarding her illness. It serves as a rebuttal to Frank Rich's New York magazine piece decrying the way in which those in Ephron's closest circles, including Rich, were finally told of the writer's illness: in a phone call from Jacob Bernstein, a day or two before she died. Bernstein calls those conversations "strangely beautiful," noting only that the longtime friends on the other end of the line "were startled and confused, but gracious." . . . Bernstein's essay reveals a devoted and admiring son coming to terms with the death of his larger-than-life, seemingly indomitable mother. STEPHANIE BUTNICK, on the Scroll blog, on tabletmag.com

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Innovation: Who Made Spring Break?

Photographs by Patrick Ward/Corbis (top); Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis (right); Claudio Vargas/AFP/Getty Images (bottom)

In 1958, Glendon Swarthout, an English professor at Michigan State University, overheard his students buzzing about their Easter-break trip to Fort Lauderdale. In that more-ecumenical era, students typically shuttled home to attend church services with their parents, but now word was spreading of another kind of spring break. Swarthout decided to tag along so that he could observe the rituals (pool-hopping, pith helmets, beatnik jazz) and capture the lingo ("beaucoup beers," "schizoid," "babyroo"). Upon his return, he dashed off a novel about coeds who cruise the beach and "play house" with boys from other colleges — a 1950s version of "Girls Gone Wild." In a nod to the Easter season, he called his book "Unholy Spring," but Hollywood executives persuaded him to change the title to "Where the Boys Are." The result was a blockbuster book that was spun off into a movie — marketed with the phrase "spring vacation" — as well as a Connie Francis song.

"That was where life imitated art," says John Laurie, a business consultant at the Kauffman Foundation, who wrote his dissertation on the history and economics of spring break. According to Laurie, after the movie came out in 1960, there were suddenly 50,000 (instead of 20,000) students going to Florida to experience the spring break they'd seen on-screen. By the mid-1980s, it was hundreds of thousands. MTV hosted its first concert at Daytona Beach in 1986, televising an orgy of beachside bikini contests, hair gel and smooth pecs. "MTV brought in major advertisers," Laurie says. The network also created the idea that the party could happen in any location with bodacious tanning opportunities.

As a college student in the 1990s, Laurie became something of a connoisseur of the Easter blowouts: "My first spring break was at Daytona Beach," he says. "My last one was Panama City Beach, Fla., which was then the spring-break capital of the world." Even as he marveled at the town gone wild, he was gripped by its bittersweetness. "After college, you can't go to spring break anymore. It's no longer socially acceptable. When it's done, it's done, and — at least for you — it's not coming back."

BEACH BARS

Sheriff Frank McKeithen of Bay County, Fla., has created a spring-break jail.

Why bring the jail down to the beach? Our regular jail is about 25 miles from Panama City Beach. We had vans that would haul people off. Unfortunately, the folks were passing out, throwing up and secreting other bodily fluids. Here, they can have fresh air, and if they're throwing up, we can wash it out.

Has anyone else set up a beach jail since you did this last year? Not that I know of. What we've built looks like two dog kennels with rubber flooring. You're talking about two million people coming through our area in a 47-day period. And they did not come to go to church.

What happens to the kids after they're booked? Well, we've started a spring-break court this year. If they're charged with misdemeanors, then the judge will assign them some hours of community service. It's humiliating for the kids when all their friends are at the bar and they're beside the road picking up trash.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More