Words in the wrong places

The Times on Sunday--the best, and the mediocore.

Thanks for doing the math
Dennis Lim's Centenarian Director’s Very Long View:

WHEN referring to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, it is now — and has been for some time — customary to affix the phrase “world’s oldest active filmmaker.” The operative word is “active.” Mr. Oliveira, who turns 100 in December, has made at least one movie a year since 1990 (when he was 82). ...

The cultural critic Edward Said, in his writings on “late style,” identified two versions of “artistic lateness.” One produces crowning glories, models of “harmony and resolution” in which a lifetime of knowledge and mastery are serenely evident. The other is an altogether more restless sensibility, the province of artists who go anything but gently into that good night, turning out works of “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”

Inside Sacks' mind
David Coleman's In Praise of Early Adapters :

IF you were to say that Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who has made as much sense of the human mind as any writer has, has a passion for objects and subjects whose appeal is less than obvious, it would not really be an understatement.

It might just mean you are not especially imaginative — not able to fathom, for instance, why Dr. Sacks would want a favorite picture of a cuttlefish on the cover of a paperback edition of his book “An Anthropologist on Mars,” even when, as his own publisher noted, it had nothing to do with the book’s contents.

Or that, at the least, you are not familiar with Dr. Sacks’s best-selling memoir, “Uncle Tungsten,” in which he detailed how, during his boyhood in World War II England, he sought refuge in the abstract purity of elemental metals. And he still does. “I love dense things,” he said cheerfully, ticking off the densities of tungsten, iridium and platinum.

He also loves ferns and cycads, believing that plants that make a garish show of their sex organs — what we call flowers — are perhaps a bit vulgar. “I feel that flowers are Johnny-come-latelies,” he said, noting that ferns predated flowering plants by more than 200 million years.

Only in New York
Jennifer Blyer's ‘Prewar’ Apartments, Rising Just Down the Street:

PREWAR used to refer to sturdily built apartment houses with high ceilings, walls so thick you couldn’t hear your neighbors and perhaps black and white tiled floors in the bathroom.

It also used to mean stately edifices built before World War II.

Such fine points apparently have not stopped developers who are building a 20-story luxury condominium at 535 West End Avenue at 86th Street, with apartments of up to 14,000 square feet and prices from $8.5 million to more than $25 million. The developers are describing the building as prewar, both in advertisements that have appeared in recent weeks in anticipation of the building’s opening in summer 2009 and on a large sign wrapped around the scaffolding at the construction site.

Wendy Streule, a graduate student in art history at Rutgers University, noticed the sign a few days ago when she and friends were strolling along West End Avenue.

“ ‘Twenty-first Century Pre-war Residences,’ ” she announced to her friends, reciting the words on the sign. “What war? Are we expecting something else? It’s a bit of an oxymoron.”

TV brings us together
Laura M. Holson's Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK):

SAVANNAH PENCE, 15, says she wants to be in touch with her parents — but also wants to keep them at arm’s length. She says her father, John, made sure that she and her 19-year-old brother, Alex, waited until high school before they got cellphones, unlike friends who had them by fifth grade. And while Savannah described her relationship with her parents as close, she still prefers her space.

“I don’t text that much in front of my parents because they read them,” she said. And when her parents ask who is on the phone? “I just say, ‘People.’ They don’t ask anymore.”

At first, John Pence, who owns a restaurant in Portland, Ore., was unsure about how to relate to his daughter. “I didn’t know how to communicate with her,” Mr. Pence said. “I had to learn.” So he took a crash course in text messaging — from Savannah. But so far he knows how to quickly type only a few words or phrases: Where are you? Why haven’t you called me? When are you coming home?

When his daughter asks a question, he typically has one response. “ ‘OK’ is the answer to everything,” he said. “And I haven’t used a question mark yet.” He said he had to learn how to text because his daughter did not return his calls. “I don’t leave a message,” he said, “because she knows it’s me.”

Savannah said she sends a text message to her father at least two or three times a day. “I can’t ask him questions because he is too slow,” she said. “He uses simple words.” On the other hand, her mother, Caprial, is more proficient at texting and will ask how her day was at school or how her friends are doing. (Her mom owed her more facile texting skills to being an agile typist with small hands.)

Early on, Savannah’s parents agreed that they had to set rules. First, they banned cellphone use at the dinner table and, later, when the family watched television together, because Mr. Pence worried about the distraction. “They become unaware of your presence,” he said.

Detainee equals terrorist
Scott Shane's The Unstudied Art of Interrogation

HOW do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.