Marlow’s Listener

Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, an eatery where the right-on, “yes we can,” ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams—wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included.

When I was in 7th grade, I got to grow radishes in the required ag class, which lasted a semester. What we did the rest of the time, I have very little recollection left, but it probably was not applying the principles of germination to the first declension or how to diagram a sentence or whatever passed for social studies.

As for Jester, he knows plenty, and isn’t talking.

I know! In order to encourage competent people to serve in government, let’s bring them back, after they’ve returned to the private sector, and frog march them into a Congressional hearing where they can be heckled from the grandest of grandstands and be painted as villians for trying to fix problems not of their own creation. What a great idea.

This film goes so far as to explain, in a helpful montage set almost a decade ago, exactly how snail mail works: You put your envelope in a mailbox—or give it to a fellow soldier—the envelope goes to a post office, a machine sorts it and then sends it on its way to the addressee

if someone failed to get the joke, the rostral cingulate zone of the brain became more active

And did you hear the one about the amygdala and the hippocampus?

But there isn’t much about it I’d want to change. It has brains and pacing and nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing. You might put it down only to wipe off the sweat.

The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has written about the Bauhaus student Marcel Breuer that ‘The late furniture sculptor and theoretician Scott Burton declared that Breuer’s club chair, designed in 1925, is at least as important a work of modern art as the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon.’ Once you have entertained that idea, it’s hard to shake.’ (Burton may be overstating the importance of a particular tubular seat — but still, hard to shake.)

You’d be forgiven for wondering if six CDs of Wilson Pickett is overkill

Here, unlike when I am in England–and escaped from what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘the Bastille of civilisation’–I find it no hardship to rise with the sun and pick my way through the boobyalla for a barefoot tramp on the sand.