Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-30-15 i The New Yorker

COMMAPHILIA Mary Norris, the “Comma Queen,” brought the world of punctuation to life in her piece (“Holy Writ,” February 23rd & March 2nd). We often abuse language, and Norris reveals an appreciation for the subtleties of expression that spring from symbols on a page. But as the director of the American Music Literacy Association, I can’t resist pointing out the questionable musical reference in the essay. Norris writes, “One plays by ear, using the comma to mark a pause, like dynamics in music; if you were reading aloud, the comma would suggest when to take a breath.” Indeed, musicians indicate a breath with a comma-like symbol at times, especially in vocal music. Dynamics, however, are another concern. Dynamics, such as forte, piano, crescendo, and diminuendo—often written as cresc. and…

Today I’m thinking about those shoes—whitewith a tangerine stripe across the toe and forceful orange heels—that fit both my mother and me. We used to shop like that—trying them on side by side. That was when there stillwas a man who would cradle your heel in his palmand guide your foot. Sometimes he would think he made a sale,only to have one of us turn to the other—and he would have to kneel again, hoping to ease another naked soleinto the bed of suède or leather. I thought those shoeswere just the peak of chic. And—my God—you bought me a pair of orange cotton gloves to complete theensemble.Why is there such keen pleasure in remembering?You are dead ten years. And these showy slippers—we wore them more than half a century…

RAW The Los Angeles-based fashion designer Heidi Luerra founded this organization in 2009 to help emerging artists attract an audience. She started with showcases in her home town, and now there are happenings in sixty cities around the globe. The affairs typically attract up to eight hundred people, and to pull it all off artists must pay a fee of three hundred dollars. But this is not simply a pay-for-play scheme: RAW offers artists a chance to fulfill their financial obligations without any outof-pocket expense, by selling twenty tickets (at fifteen dollars apiece) to a given event, making it a bit like crowd-funding in three dimensions. More than sixty thousand artists have found this arrangement agreeable, and each gathering includes short films, fashion shows, musical performances, a pop-up art…

Driving down Ninth Avenue, choking on diesel fumes from a truck just ahead of us, I say to my friend Billy (he is exactly two-thirds my age), “I wonder whether you will see the end of internal-combustion engines, the end of oil, a cleaner world.” A cleaner world. The thought zooms me away from Ninth Avenue to a forest world—in particular, to the one described in “That Glorious Forest,” Sir Ghillean Prance’s book about his thirty-nine visits to the Amazon in the past fifty years. Prance, one of our greatest tropical botanists, is very much in the tradition of Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce, who charted the region in the eighteen-fifties. But Prance’s is not just a botanical eye: he sees what we are doing…