Reviews and News:
Who wants to live forever with the people who want to live forever?
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Is Euler’s identity the most beautiful mathematical equation?
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The afterlife of Zelda Fitzgerald: “Sixty-nine years after her death and 85 years after the publication of her only completed novel, Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald is still making news.”
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Life after Caesar’s assassination: “What of the ordinary men and women who were not in the limelight? Did life for them go on much as before, while the big men and their armies fought it out? Or did the violence and bloodshed touch almost everyone?”
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Faking the good life: “What began as an attempt at a simpler life quickly became a life-style brand.”
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Was Nabokov more interested in beauty than people? “‘He had beautiful manners,’ wrote Laughlin of Nabokov, ‘but his blood was icy.’ He then proceeded to tell a story from that summer in Utah: after a long day of butterflying, Nabokov returned for dinner and ‘told me that he had heard what sounded like groaning in Grizzly Gulch,’ which seems to have been roughly a mile away from Alta Lodge. Caught up in the chase of a particular butterfly, Nabokov hadn’t bothered to investigate. ‘Next day some hikers found the body of an old prospector who had fallen in the steep gulch and cracked open his head and bled to death.'”
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Czeslaw Milosz’s sci-fi critique of liberal Christianity.
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Essay of the Day:
In Harper’s, Vauhini Vara takes us inside the Indian-American spelling bee community:
“The final two contestants of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, held just outside Washington last May, had gone head-to-head for ten rounds. Nihar Janga, a toothy eleven-year-old with a bowl cut and the vocal pitch of a cartoon character, delighted the audience by breaking with custom: instead of asking the official pronouncer for definitions, he provided them himself. Taoiseach: ‘Is this an Irish prime minister?’ (Yes.) Biniou: ‘Is this a Breton bagpipe?’ (Right again.) His opponent, Jairam Hathwar, a stoic thirteen-year-old, had been favored to win, in large part because his older brother, Sriram, had won in 2014.
“But Jairam was hesitating. The kids had made it through their school and regional contests, in New York and Texas, respectively, as well as a series of tests at nationals, where they handled such unpronounceables as gyttja, chremslach, and uintjie. Now he was being asked to spell drahthaar, an obscure German breed of dog. Nihar knew this one. Jairam didn’t. He made an attempt, ‘D-R-A-A-T-H-A-A-R.’ Nihar shook his head. When Jairam finished, a bell dinged to indicate his error; he blanched and went to his seat. Then Nihar leaned forward, thrust his hands in Jairam’s face, and began, expressionlessly, to clap. That is how Nihar Janga came to be called the Machine.
“A few months later, on a Friday night in August, I was standing with the Machine in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Tampa, Florida, when his former rival walked through the door. Nihar charged over and squealed, ‘Jairam! I missed you!’ Jairam took a step back. ‘Hi, Nihar,’ he said. The two had ended up as cochampions at Scripps (a more common occurrence lately) thanks to a quirk in spelling-bee rules: when there are two people left onstage and one of them misspells in a round, the other has to correctly spell a final word in order to win. After Jairam flubbed drahthaar, Nihar erred on ayacahuite, sending the contest into twelve more rounds before a tie was declared. The prize for each boy was $40,000.
“Nihar and Jairam were friends, having met on the spelling circuit a year earlier. Nihar was the more excitable of the pair, prone to gleeful shouting, sometimes at inappropriate moments. After Scripps, he’d insisted to me that he offered the definitions of words because it made him feel more confident. He also said that his applause at the misspelling of drahthaar had been meant to cheer Jairam up, not to intimidate him. Jairam, polite and good-natured, accepted this — or, in any case, said that he did.”
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Photo: Prague
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Poem: Michael Shewmaker, “The End of the Sermon”
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