Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-13-14 i The New Yorker

CURVY COUTURE As a girl who has recently come to terms with the fact that my hips just won’t fit into the super-skinny jeans marketed to my age group, I enjoyed reading Lizzie Widdicombe’s piece (“The Plus Side,” September 22nd). It is worth pointing out something that may prove to be crucial in fully understanding the relationship between 0-to-12-size clothing and plus-size: a size 8 today means something quite different from what it did in 1985. As the article states, the average dress size has gone from an 8 to a 14 over the past thirty years. We are calling more people plus-size these days, and I am beginning to wonder if this isn’t creating a sharper dichotomy in the fashion world. In American culture, at the peak of…

I was reading up on my Hellenic math: no zero yet, no transfinite set theory, no sine or cosine, just a Brotherhood that felt divine to its practitioners. You were back in California, riding on the waves, your father gone awhile, and me, you said, no consolation outside of the bed. I’ve never yet let go of zero, the multiplier best employed on incommensurate sums, either one on top a lovelier ratio, but when divided through becomes a number that can’t compute but instead goes on, in proof, diminished by each digit that it spews. Eudoxus did not quite anticipate you, a curve that skims but will not touch the bottom line. And then the Romans came, and all was lost for quite some time.…

Alone in Woody Creek, Colorado,I fell asleep reading “Measure for Measure,”Right at the part where the Duke deliversHis Old Testament decision of hastePaying for haste, and leisure answeringLeisure, like quitting like, and (wait for it)Measure for measure. I saw it performedOnce, in Stratford; I was maybe twenty.I only remembered the “measure stillFor measure” part, until now. It stuckWith me. But the rest of it was wiped cleanFrom my memory, all of Stratford, too.Still, the way the actor leaned on that halfLine, “measure still for measure,” as though itWere the measure of his self, measure stillFor measure, all these years, I rememberedBeing the heart of the play, its great gist;But I forgot it was a death sentence.Whether Angelo deserved such a fate,Or Isabella’s ability toRise above the mire doesn’t matter:Death, not…