Brand-new MacArthur Fellows include Atul Gawande, George Saunders, Adrian LeBlanc, Sarah Ruhl, John Zorn, Matias Zaldarriaga, and Alan Bennett. OK, Bennett wasn’t up for one. But tell me he’s not a genius and I’ll tell you the Pope doesn’t wear a tall hat. Or is it a dunce cap?

An Irish-born man in California named Morris Cantley is a chipper 102, and it’s a plausible hypothesis that it’s his choice of reading matter as well as his fondness for citrus fruits that may have done the trick. Bobbe Monk writes in The Daily Facts:

Morris Cantley reads four newspapers, one news magazine and the New Yorker magazine nearly every day; exercises for one to two hours in exercise classes; and leads a semi-vegetarian lifestyle.
He said he is amazed at cell phones, considering them a blessing especially in emergencies; decries the necessity of security guards in so many places and likes sports, especially Golden Bears football and basketball and the Lakers.
He is 102.
A resident of Plymouth Village since 1982, Cantley has diabetes and is hard of hearing, but that doesn’t stop this centenarian who is a popular resident at the village.
A native of Dublin, Ireland, he came to the United States when he was just a baby, his family settling on the West Coast. His father worked for Edison, finding a job just two days after arriving and staying with the company until he retired.
…
Over the years Morris was active in the UC Berkeley Alumni Association, the Inland “Cs,” was for many years Scholarship chairman for San Bernardino County; served on the 1973 Grand Jury and was a member of the Grand Jury Association. He was also a member of the San Bernardino County Museum, World Affairs Council of Southern California, Kimberly-Shirk Association, Friends of he A.K. Smiley Public Library, Redlands Art Association, Edward-Dean Museum in Cherry Valley and an honorary member of the Democratic Club.
…
Another part of his health regime is to eat oranges every day, from one to two, as well as drinking orange juice frequently. He likes all kinds of fruit including bananas, pineapple, grapes and melons. He eats a lot of vegetables, but not much meat.
…
Looking back a little, he said there were some good things about the “good old days.”
“Doctors came to your home when you were sick. You didn’t have to sit around in a waiting room full of old magazines.” Of course now he doesn’t have to either, the doctors come to him.

Depends which old magazines, doesn’t it? Just think, TNY wasn’t even around till he was 21!

From Inside Higher Education‘s pseudonymous columnist Fleur LaDouleur, on the planet-naming process, the farewell to Pluto, a 1907 tryst between the sun and the moon, and other bridges and burned bridges between the Two Cultures:

Those of us in the humanities were reminded recently of our place in the universe. Here’s the deal: When space was handed out, we were out having coffee and lost our place in line to … wandering cognitive scientists. But the coffee was good and gave us a chance to ponder yet again what we thought were the very serious questions: Was Heidegger a Nazi? Was Manet an Impressionist or was that Monet? Is the universe — oops, the university — in ruins? We learned on August 24, however, that a decision of importance to those interested in knowledge in general was made without our input and that — on top of it all — this decision involved shrinking the available space in the university — oops, the universe — allotted to humanistic endeavors. Is this gerrymandering? You bet. And Pluto’s out. We’re down from nine to eight in our naming rights, and that’s what humanists do — we name things.
…
Other recent decisions in the scientific community have also been pushed through committees without the input of the humanities. As everyone knows, any bona fide humanist reads The New Yorker. The bona fide among you will recall a recent article in that magazine on the “Fields Medal,” the big shot medal in mathematics (we thought it was the Nobel Prize — wrong again). According to The New Yorker, this Fields Medal business could lead to increased global warming, as Russian and Chinese scholars duke it out. (By the way, the Russian guy, who lives with his mother and has no friends, sounds suspiciously like a humanist). I am not saying that if someone from, say, modern languages and literatures had been on the committee that world peace would be ensured; I am saying that that person could have communicated in the native tongues to help sort out misunderstandings — translation is, after all, just another way of naming things.

I can’t agree with LaDouleur that all physicists have a God complex, but I laughed when I got to this line: “I know many people of my generation who would much rather have seen a man walk on Pluto than on the Moon, even if it took him 2,000 light years to get there and even if he never came back.” And I’m very pleased that she mentions H.A. Rey’s Find the Constellations, I book I loved that taught me how to pronounce Betelgeuse years before the Winona Ryder movie.

Related on Emdashes:
Math Is Hard
You’re Always a Planet to Me, Pluto

From the LiveJournal group for New Yorker fans (posted June 12):

DC/VA/MD New Yorker Readers Discussion Group

Like a book club, but for the New Yorker magazine, in the Washington, DC metro area.

We have a couple of openings in our New Yorker magazine reading group. We get together at a cafe or coffee shop to talk about recent articles and cartoons in the magazine. We usually have two long and two short articles chosen to be read in advance, along with questions to stimulate discussion. That’s easier than reading The Da Vinci Code, isn’t it?

The next meeting is coming up soon, so if you live in the DC area and want to talk about the magazine in person, contact me for the details.

Want to join, if they’ve still got space? Why wouldn’t you? Email John here.

An appealing reader and writer in New Delhi, Mayank Austen Soofi, has a novel encounter with War and Peace and others (boldface mine):

I was sixteen when I was given a copy of War and Peace by a family friend as a birthday gift. This gentleman had no passion for books and had mistakenly assumed, after noticing my stacks of Enid Blytons, Nancy Drews… and let’s face it… Danielle Steels and Sidney Sheldons, that I was into serious reading. He was unaware that I was only beginning to recover from a bad decision of buying Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. I had read an easy English version of David Copperfield in my school without realizing it was not the original edition. (Nobody told me!)

I had imagined that A Tale of Two Cities would be an equally easy, exciting, emotional, tearful roller-coaster of a novel. But I could not go beyond the first celebrated paragraph of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” This was an original unedited version and Charles Dickens was difficult!

Now I had this War and Peace. It was thick as an elephant and had a most appealing cover of an elegantly dressed Napoleon, in his Tricorn hat, riding atop a white horse on a grassy slope. The evocative cover picture appeared to be a still from some television series based on the novel.

The translation, of course, was by the great Constance Garnett. At that time journalist David Remnick still had to write his now-celebrated essay on different translations of Russian novels (“The Translation Wars”, 7 November, 2005, New Yorker; not available online), and so my ignorance rescued me from the torment of later years that a translation could be of great significance to the soul of a story originally written in an unfamiliar language.

Besides, it did not occur to me that Constance Garnett was a woman!
…
After a quick settlement with the sympathetic owner of a Delhi bookshop, the book soon arrived from Toronto. It was difficult to get my eyes off the cover. I turned to the first page and felt at home. They were all characters who had by now almost become a family: Anna Pavlovna, Anatole, Prince Vassily, Boris, Dolohov, Princess Bolonsky, Pierre….

But just as I begun to finally enjoy the novel, there appeared The Looming Tower – a most gripping book on 9/11. My greedy mind struggled with tormenting life-defining questions: is it advisable to stick to reading a rather-dull thousand page novel while the heart is whispering to opt for a thin one which promises to be a page turner and a quick read? If I stand by War and Peace, would my distracting mind be able to give full attention it deserves?

And more seriously, don’t I realize that life is short and books are many? If I’m not exactly enjoying War and Peace, if my heart is not in it, do I still need to read it? Won’t I be better reading books I could enjoy? What if I die tomorrow? Won’t it be tragic to have spent the last minutes of my life reading something which I was forcing myself to read and not because I really wanted to? Hello, who am I fooling?

So I dumped Tolstoy for The Looming Tower which I hungrily devoured only to start Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories. There seems to be no immediate plans for War and Peace. I have instead decided to wait for the much-awaited and much-hyped new translation that is to be released in the fall of 2007 by Modern Library.

The classic is being translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky – a celebrated couple who are considered the best Russian language translators of our times. Their translation of Anna Karenina was famously selected by Oprah for her book club. The critics are already calling it the authoritative translation in English.

Oh yes, I promise to read the hardbound edition of that translation of the War and Peace.

Also, there’s a curious little Edward P. Jones and New Yorker anecdote here in the North Carolina newspaper the News & Observer (by William L. Hamilton, originally in the NYT). I’d like to hear more of this story.

Finally, since we should really stop separating the various branches of culture, since lord knows they sometimes struggle on their long roads alone, this Sarasota note from Southwest Florida’s Herald Tribune. Charlie Huisking writes:

Hard to replace

The thought of replacing Daniel Moe as artistic director of Key Chorale is daunting not only to the organization, but to some of the candidates.

“Several have told us they’ve replied to our ad with trepidation, because they hold Daniel in such high regard,” said Key Chorale executive director Richard Storm.

A former director of the renowned Oberlin College Choir in Ohio, the 80-year-old Moe was called the “dean” of choral conductors by New Yorker magazine. He has led the 100-member Key Chorale for 20 years.

Complicating the search is the part-time nature of the job. A successor who isn’t in semi-retirement as Moe was would need to supplement his or her income, likely as an educator or church musician.

Three finalists will come to Sarasota in January to conduct the choir. “They’ll each do one piece from the standard rep — a great warhorse — and then a new piece,” Storm said.

Moe has been “generous in his approach to this process,” Storm said. “He purposely hasn’t recommended any candidates, and he’s encouraged us to look at anyone we feel might be a good candidate.”

Was this an Alex Ross piece? My Complete New Yorker will know. Stay tuned.

Garrison Keillor remembered it.

Update: If you have a yen to read the second paywalled piece, an op-ed by Ron Gettelfinger about the wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article “The Risk Pool,” here it is in The MetroWest Daily News.

Honestly.

Cate Kennedy
From Australia’s The Age:

Next month is going to be a big one for serial short-story award-winner Cate Kennedy. First, her collection Dark Roots is to be published by Scribe. Of course, that’s plenty exciting but the icing on the cake is provided by The New Yorker, which is going to include one of her stories, Black Ice, in its September 11 edition. (She’s following in the footsteps of great Australians such as Amy Witting.) So Kennedy is chuffed. “It would never have happened if I’d just sent it to them. It’s really thanks to Henry Rosenbloom (of Scribe), who sent it to their New York agents.” The Benalla-based writer, who has twice won the Age short-story competition, is in the final stages of working with New Yorker editors – there are five who work on the magazine’s fiction – on her story. They are concerned with some of the Australian terms, musing over gum trees and weatherboards apparently. “I do have the power of veto but I am saying yes to whatever they say,” Kennedy says. So with the combination of Dark Roots appearing and the story in The New Yorker, is she expecting big things? “I just want to get the collection out in the world and get people reading it. I’m not sure it will lead to an international signing.” What Kennedy wants to do now is write a novel. “I need to write one. It’s like my albatross. I’ve done a bit of poetry, non-fiction, this collection. I have to address the novel question.” This might not be helped by the presence of her six-month-old daughter, Rosalyn. “She does dictate my writing time but I actually find I’m more productive.”