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Landmarking the Strand, the Origins of Aladdin, and Actors Acting Badly

Also: Why do people play the lottery?
640px-Strand_Bookstore

You may remember the owner of the Strand Bookstore, Nancy Bass Wyden, asking the City of New York not to name its building (which Wyden also owns) a historic landmark. Such a move would subject the store to “a lifetime of needless red tape” and would make it more difficult for it to stay in business: “We operate on thin margins in a fragile economic environment,” she had said at the time. The city has ignored her appeal and has approved the building for landmark status. Sarah Carroll, who chairs the Landmarks Preservation Commission, told Wyden to trust the bureaucracy: “I’m confident that the commission’s review of the masterplan and any future applications will provide [the] flexibility the Strand needs to remain nimble and innovative and to continue its important place in New York City, and adapt to a changing retail climate.” Sure.

John Wilson enjoyed The New York Times’s fat summer reading issue, but something was missing, too.

Andrew J. Bacevich reviews David Brook’s The Second Mountain: “David Brooks eludes easy classification. To call him a journalist is the equivalent of calling Donald Trump a real-estate developer: the label may not be wrong, but it is thoroughly insufficient. A columnist for the New York Times, author of several bestsellers, regular participant in weekly NPR and PBS news roundups—did I mention his teaching gig at Yale?—Brooks is anything but an ink-stained wretch. He is our Walter Lippmann, positioned above the fray to tell us what it all means. Brooks differs from Lippmann in at last two respects. He possesses a wry sense of humor, whereas Lippmann seemingly never cracked a smile. And while Lippmann distanced himself from his Jewish heritage, Brooks has never done so. He is thoroughly a Jew, albeit one whose personal Exodus story has now led him to become a kind of Christian as well. That’s the big reveal in ‘A Most Unexpected Turn of Events,’ the twenty-first chapter of his new book, The Second Mountain. As for the twenty preceding chapters and the several that follow it, I suppose it’s all a matter of taste, but I found them formulaic, preachy, and too pat. Skip them or skim them as you will. Yet linger over Chapter 21 with its moving and insightful account of the author’s own midlife spiritual awakening.”

Bad actors: “Several members of the Television Academy’s Performers Peer Group (read: actors) have been disqualified from voting for the upcoming Primetime Emmy Awards. According to a Wednesday memo sent to the group and obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, a few members were found to have engaged in or advocated for block voting. That is to say, they discussed voting with other members of the group with the intention of all voting for one or more specific projects.”

“Why has so little of Walter Kempowski’s work appeared in English?” That’s Blake Morrision’s opening question in his review of Kempowski’s recently translated Homeland. “In Germany he was and remains a well-known figure but critical recognition was slow in coming there too. Only with All for Nothing, published as Alles umsonst in 2006, did he feel he was given his due and he didn’t have long to enjoy it: he was 77 when the novel came out and he died the following year. In an interview he gave in his last months, he’s wry and a little bitter about it: ‘You were ignored for a long time by the literature business. And you suffered as a result. And now shortly before you pass away, you’re suddenly a literary star.’ ‘I don’t understand that either. It could have come a bit sooner.’ It might have come sooner if he’d been less of a curmudgeon and less at odds with a leftist intelligentsia (think Kingsley Amis and you get the idea).”

The origins on Aladdin: “Quick! Name a story from The Arabian Nights. If you answered ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’ as most people probably do, you’d be wrong—at least technically speaking. There is no evidence that this beloved classic, now usually encountered in nursery versions, or on film, was ever part of the collection called Alf Layla wa-Layla—that is, A Thousand Nights and a Night. What’s more, no early Arabic original has ever been found. ‘Aladdin’ exists today only because of the 18th-century Orientalist Antoine Galland.”

Essay of the Day:

Why do people, who have almost no chance of winning, play the lottery. Adam Piore explains in Nautilus:

“To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in 2013, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, offers this scenario: head down to your local convenience store, slap $2 on the counter, and fill out a six-numbered Powerball ticket. It will take you about 10 seconds. To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss, or 50 percent, you will need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, filling out tickets for the next 55 years. It’s going be expensive. You will have to plunk down your $2 at least 86 million times.

“Williams, who studies lotteries, could have simply said the odds of winning the $590 million jackpot were 1 in 175 million. But that wouldn’t register. ‘People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,’ Williams says. ‘It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.’ And so we continue to play. And play. People in 43 states bought a total of 232 million Powerball tickets for the lottery won by MacKenzie. In fact, the lottery in the United States is so exceedingly popular that it was one of the few consumer products where spending held steady and, in some states, increased, during the recent recession. That’s still the case. About 57 percent of Americans reported buying tickets in the last 12 months, according to a recent Gallup study. And for the 2012 fiscal year, U.S. lottery sales totaled about $78 billion, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.

“It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, ‘Hey, you never know.’ Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we ‘frame’ and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale. And nobody knows how to sell hope and dreams better than Rebecca Paul Hargrove.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Triangular Shadow

Poem: John Wall Barger, “The Most Handsome Man in the Neighborhood”

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