Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-01-14 i The New Yorker

GLUTEN ANXIETY We at the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness applaud Michael Specter for providing important information about celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity (“Against the Grain,” November 3rd). We encourage anyone with symptoms or a heightened risk of celiac disease to get tested, and to keep eating gluten until the results come in, to avoid a potential false negative. As Specter points out, self-diagnosis of non-celiac gluten sensitivity is notoriously unreliable. The lack of diagnostic testing for gluten sensitivity, combined with the popularity of gluten-free diets and abundant misinformation about the “benefits” of eating gluten-free creates a Wild West effect, making it impossible for the average person to navigate the facts responsibly. A significant number of those who seek to reduce or eliminate gluten do so for perceived…

Class was called The Wide Stars Above Our Sky. Charles and I enrolled while Shira planned her summer abroad helping those in need. Across the kitchen table she unfurled a map, flattening it down with her palm, then pointed to a small country near Russia. Shira said, “Let’s check out that hot Peruvian- Asian restaurant downtown.” I declined, deciding to eat dinner with my parents instead. Chai, the puppy, was eight weeks old. I plowed through snow to purchase a knee joint at Kriser’s so she would stop chewing the chairs and table. Shira didn’t think she’d meet the right man in the tiny country adjoining Russia. My graduate-school poetry professor offered the workshop every twenty minutes. Black ice slicked down back alleys, intersections. Monuments of snow barricaded sidewalks. Charles…

Thanksgiving Roundup In 1924, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was organized by employees of the department store. Initially called the Macy’s Christmas Parade, it featured live animals from the Central Park Zoo. Three years later, the pageant’s iconic balloons were introduced, and this year the festivities include performances by Idina Menzel, Kiss, and many others. (macys.com/parade.) On the Saturday after the holiday, Shorewalkers, a nonprofit group whose motto is “See New York at 3 M.P.H.,” presents its annual Walk Off the Turkey trot, a calorie-consuming, twelve-mile amble from the Staten Island Ferry terminal to the George Washington Bridge, starting at 10 A.M. (shorewalkers.org.) Later that day, Arlo Guthrie returns to Carnegie Hall with the Guthrie family for an evening of folk songs, storytelling, and waxing philosophical, the first…

She lost her hat in the a.m.— in front of the Laundromat where she has been unconscious in the hammock of his narrative for most of this day—the snake in the tree above them was digesting a small deer— the deer’s bones like a ghost ship blossoming as a mere trick inside a clear bottle— it now sails past the day moon on her long bare arm which she scratches with the calloused toe of a croissant, the coffee is bitter enough. She says to the colonized moon, to its residential rich, “I’ve always hated the traffic in this town— its miracle of legumes and fish.”…