November 2023
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Just about every NBA team now has a non-native 7-foot center on its roster. What's wrong with America — can't we produce sequoia-size centers any more? Except for Minneapolis-born Chet Holmgren, Oklahoma's incredible rookie, by jiminy they're all furriners. The last three MVPs, mirabile dictu, all big guys, originated elsewhere: Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo from Nigeria…
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The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as…
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Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was…
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An "ongon," frequently depicted, it turns out, in Ice Age Mongolian art, is a type of shamanistic spirit. When a shaman dies, he becomes an ongon. My dictionary says that the plural of ongon is ongod, but the prehistoric art book in which I found this word prefers ongones. I doubt I'll have regular occasion…
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I must confess that I had never heard of architect-entrepreneur Robert Stern until I read Martin Filler's NYRB review of Stern's recent autobiography — which is called Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture. How could I have been so behindhand, so ill-informed? Filler's evaluation of the memoir is sharp-elbowed. He plainly doesn't like…