He’s my first reader and we know each other very well and, unless he thinks something is disastrous, in the first instance he’s encouraging and vague: ‘Keep at it. Keep going’ and when there’s a draft and it’s possible to be a more critical reader in a productive way, then he will be, but if I showed him 20 pages, he won’t start doing line edits or say, ‘This character needs more development on page four,’ you know. He won’t do that. He’ll just say, ‘Keep going. That’s great.’ … But he will [be more critical] later on. He’s well trained.

— Novelist Claire Messud tells Terry Gross about the living-working relationshipwith her husband, The New Yorker fiction critic, James Wood.

Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety.

— Atul Gawande, “Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready”

Well, I’ve always said I’m not by temperament romantic about revolutions or given to revolution. I’ve always thought that they are not the ideal way to change, but we were in a situation where we didn’t have any other option and so, in this case, we had to have a revolution. But revolutions — and history shows them to be incredibly temperamental things — they call for excitement and violence and blood and impatience, all the things that I … personally, that I fear and dislike.

— Hisham Matar tells Terry Gross about his thoughts on revolution, specifically the one last year in Libya.

Hisham Matar talks to Terry Gross about how, while his father was a political prisoner in Libya, he would recite poetry for himself and the other prisoners. Matar’s father was kidnapped in 1990 and Matar never saw him again.:

It was an astonishing demonstration and victory on his part, on an old argument that he and I had because, like most children, I wasn’t exactly excited about being obliged to memorize pages and pages of text, and he would try to convince me about the virtues of doing such a thing, that it would teach you about language. He described it once, he said, ‘I… [R]eading a poem is like a bird flying over a forest but memorizing it is like that same bird walking through the forest. …” So he would give me all these examples to try to sell me the idea of memorizing these poems, which i did and later of course learned other virtues — many wonderful virtues — of memorizing text, that it does feel like company in a sense. But this story of him reciting poems to comfort himself and others in prison was just another demonstration of how right he was and it made me feel, it made me feel, I was happy for him to have had these poems in his chest, that they were there to delight and comfort perhaps and entertain him and others.

When he was a child Matar’s father had told him that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”

image by catinthecupboard

An unabashed fan of artist/illustrator/writer Maira Kalman (I have a copy of “My Mother’s Beautiful Map” hanging in my cubicle here at work), I offer you this pre-assignment Kalman has given illustration students in a class she is teaching this summer.

The New Yorker :

… take a half hour walk every day for ten days. Without cell phones, just walk and observe what’s around you for half an hour. And I am sure—I’m very sure—that asking them to spend half an hour without a cell phone is like asking them to take their clothes off. No cell phones, no cup of coffee—just take a solitary walk. If you want to be pretentious about it, Immanuel Kant is famous for taking his walk everyday at 3:30 P.M., so I suggested that time to them. It’s a good time of day; it’s a little bit tired, a little bit sleepy time of day.

It’s good advice.

For your weekend reading, Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker profile of programmer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, “Requiem for a Dream.” Much has been written about Swartz in the wake of his January suicide and you might well — and understandably so — be Swartz-ed out. That said, this piece illustrates him not as martyr figure or genius figure or any other kind of figure, but as a complicated, brilliant and difficult human being. MacFarquhar uses block quotes from the people closest to him and juxtaposes the quotes against one another to illuminating effect. This paragraph in particular struck me. It articulates so well the nature of writing online and what effect that can have on readers. I’ve been thinking about it all week:

Prose creates a strong illusion of presence—so strong that it is difficult to destroy it. It is hard to remember that you are reading and not hearing. The illusion is stronger when the prose is online, partly because you are aware that it might be altered or redacted at any moment—the writer may be online, too, as you read it—and partly because the Internet has been around for such a short time that we implicitly assume (as we do not with a book) that the writer of a blog post is alive.

Image of Aaron Swartz via John-Brown/Flickr

Jeffrey Toobin tells Terry Gross about the relationship between Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

I think there are actually many more parallels between Ginsburg and O’Connor than there are differences, starting with their academic distinction and difficulties getting jobs. Also, I think the affection between them was so real. I remember interviewing Justice Ginsburg once during that period before Justice Sotomayor was appointed [and] when she was the only woman on the Court and she hated that. She really didn’t like being the only woman on the Court and she liked the fact — and O’Connor liked the fact — that they were different in many ways. You know, here you have O’Connor, this tall, outgoing, rangey westerner, and Ginsburg, this bookish Brooklynite, and they both like the idea that it showed that women aren’t just one way in the world, that women are complicated and different from one another, yet it’s important that women also be represented and both of them are fierce advocates for more women judges and more women in all positions of power.

You can listen to yesterday’s interview with Justice O’Connor here. And trust us: we mean ‘Listen.’ The transcript does not do justice to the audio.

Image of Ginsburg via the New York Historical Society

Image of O’Connor by StealMySoul/Flickr

[Ruth Bader] Ginsburg speaks warmly of [Sandra Day] O’Connor, who shared the same generational struggles. Indeed, Ginsburg sees the O’Connor departure (and the arrival of Alito) as the turning point for the modern Court. “The one big change in the time I’ve been here has been the loss of Justice O’Connor,” Ginsburg told me. “I think if you look at the term when she was not with us, every five-to-four decision when I was with the four, I would have been with the five if she had stayed.

— Jeffrey Toobin, in a profile of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — “Heavyweight” — for this week’s New Yorker (pay wall). Tomorrow on the show, Terry talks with Toobin about Ginsburg and the Court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was on the show today.

Over at The New Yorker Emily Nussbaum is developing the “Hummingbird Theory” about a new character archetype that includes Amy Jellicoe from HBO’s Enlightened:

Meanwhile, I’d been obsessing, like many other TV critics, about the fate of the great HBO series “Enlightened,” whose main character, played by Laura Dern, possesses a similar intensity—and provokes a similar anxiety. You could see Amy Jellicoe as a gender flip on Larry David: she’s another Californian liberal who wants, and fails, to be good. At first glance, “Enlightened” looks cynical, a caustic satire like “Curb” and “Veep.” But Mike White’s show is a more radical creation, in part because Amy, like Sue, is a heroine. This is true despite the fact that she makes viewers, and everyone who meets her, wildly uncomfortable: Amy’s inner vision of herself as a chill New Age seeker is rarely matched by her outward appearance. She’s needy, she’s manipulative, she’s passive-aggressive. Yet despite her flaws, her heart is pure. Her idealism is real.

As we eye the third consecutive weekend where the East Coast faces a storm of some sort (snow, sleet, ice, what have you got for us, February?), here’s a weather-themed piece for your weekend reading by Thomas Beller in the New Yorker — “Remembrance of Snows Past.” Beller writes about memories of his childhood conjured by snow, but It’s not a sentimental piece about the glories of the Flexible Flier. Instead, a piece about how snow can sometimes seem to stop — or rather compress — time. As the title suggests, the essay is as much about time and the people we lose to it as it is about the weather itself.

My image of this childhood sled derives from an encounter of not too many years ago, when I found one in my mother’s closet. It was shortly after my daughter was born. We were excavating the closet in my old bedroom so that my little family would have room to visit for extended stays. My mother’s closets were so stuffed with things that each one was like a miniature attic, crowded to point that mere entry was almost impossible. Sometimes this was oppressive. More often it was magical. It was as though each of my mother’s closets were one of those circus Volkswagens out of which clowns would continuously pour.

Image by Vivian Gucwa/Flickr

Haggis forwarded his resignation to more than twenty Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. “I felt if I sent it to my friends they’d be as horrified as I was, and they’d ask questions as well,” he says. “That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that I’d send a letter like that.”

Tommy Davis told me, “People started calling me, saying, ‘What’s this letter Paul sent you?’ ” The resignation letter had not circulated widely, but if it became public it would likely cause problems for the church. The St. Petersburg Times exposé had inspired a fresh series of hostile reports on Scientology, which has long been portrayed in the media as a cult. And, given that some well-known Scientologist actors were rumored to be closeted homosexuals, Haggis’s letter raised awkward questions about the church’s attitude toward homosexuality. Most important, Haggis wasn’t an obscure dissident; he was a celebrity, and the church, from its inception, has depended on celebrities to lend it prestige. In the past, Haggis had defended the religion; in 1997, he wrote a letter of protest after a French court ruled that a Scientology official was culpable in the suicide of a man who fell into debt after paying for church courses. “If this decision carries it sets a terrible precedent, in which no priest or minister will ever feel comfortable offering help and advice to those whose souls are tortured,” Haggis wrote. To Haggis’s friends, his resignation from the Church of Scientology felt like a very public act of betrayal. They were surprised, angry, and confused. “ ‘Destroy the letter, resign quietly’—that’s what they all wanted,” Haggis says.

— “Paul Haggis vs. The Church of Scientology” by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, February 14, 2011. Wright’s book about Scientology — Going Clear — was released last week, and Wright will be on the show today to discuss it.

Cancer is perhaps the iconic disease of our time. Everyone knows and loves—or has known and loved—someone stricken. It gets people of every age: people who have done bad things to their bodies and people who have not. It can kill quickly, slowly, or not at all. Because it takes so many forms, it’s something that everyone can relate to but that no one completely understands. And thus it’s particularly easy to exploit and to wrap in mythology. If you’ve created a character, you can give him cancer and then declare that almost anything else happened next. There are real stories about young boys dying, college-age women dying, and adults surviving to bicycle competitively again. The reality of all these other tales is what makes these three hoaxes so pernicious: they all cheapen something profound. And they all make me very angry.

— “Livestrong, For Real” by Nicholas Thompson on The New Yorker’s News Desk

A truly lovely remembrance of the late pianist Charles Rosen by Jeremy Denk over at the New Yorker:

At the end of the corridor was the nerve center: a piano stacked with music, a desk stuffed with papers, a threadbare couch, and a book-covered coffee table. It was desperately unhip. But it was affecting and intense, the accumulation of things, of ideas, and Charles’s shuffle.

Listen to Rosen play Chopin here.

Listen to the Fresh Air interview with Denk here.

On today’s show, Raffi Khatchadourian talks about his article in this week’s New Yorker — “Operation Delirium” — about a scientist who tested psychochemicals for the military during the Cold War. Khatchadourian writes about how one of the doctors would slip LSD to military volunteers at the Edgewood testing center who had no idea what they were being given:

Testing psychochemicals for intelligence purposes, Sim (Van Murray Sim, an internist, who had set up the Medical Research Volunteer Program ) appeared to believe, required a uniquely loose protocol: the goal was to control the mind, and the subject’s expectations of the drug’s effect mattered. He often gave LSD to people without warning. Not long after arriving at Edgewood, Ketchum took to playing tennis with a commanding officer at the arsenal, who, after a match one day, described how Sim had spiked his morning coffee with LSD. ‘He was pissed off as hell,’ Ketchum told me. LSD had been mixed into cocktails at a party, and into an Army unit’s water supply. Some men handled it fine; some went berserk.

Read the whole piece here. Listen to a clip from the interview here.

“The Supreme Court is saying that campaign spending is a matter of free speech, but it has set up a situation where the more money you have the more speech you can buy,” Axelrod says. “That’s a threatening concept for democracy.” He adds, “If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there’s no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We’re averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or even eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we’re back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.”

-from Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article, Schmooze or Lose