| | | In today’s newsletter: the romance of American activism; a photographer’s “witch’s cauldron”; and the opera swimmers of Brooklyn. | | | | “Bridge has so many moving parts that cheating can be both easy to do and hard to detect,” David Owen writes, in a report today on this past summer’s “Great Bridge Boycott.” He recounts the events leading up to the European Bridge League’s qualifying tournament for the 2021 World National Team Championships, where all thirty teams that were scheduled to compete against the Italian team forfeited in protest. The implied reason? The inclusion on the Italian team of Fulvio Fantoni, a notorious player who was accused of cheating several years ago. (Fantoni, and his regular partner, Claudio Nunes, have denied all allegations of cheating, and have declined to comment.) A mention of bridge can conjure easy stereotypes, of “little old ladies” and folding card tables—in contrast to the game’s cousin, poker, with its suspenseful battles and associations with “Casino Royale.” But the stakes, and the subterfuge, are serious in bridge, where a long-standing history of cheating through the use of secret signals and subtle gestures has dethroned many a champion. Owen mentions the alleged misdeeds of an infamous team dubbed the Italian Foot Soldiers, who were accused of illegal foot tapping, and the Race Cars, in which one player appeared to sneak a peek at his opponent’s cards and then positioned his arms and fingers to convey information to his partner. (Both teams denied the allegations.) These scandals, and the most recent one involving Fantoni, have had “a similar effect on bridge that Anya Taylor-Joy’s wardrobe and living-room furniture in ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ have had on chess,” Owen notes. “They’ve made the game seem more interesting to some people who’ve never played it.” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor Read “The Great Bridge Boycott.” Owen has also written about bridge’s problem of professional cheating, the game’s historical rise and fall, and what makes for a good partner. (One player said, “The reason I started was that my marriage was very rocky, and my wife and I thought we should find an activity together. Now I don’t have that wife anymore, but I still have bridge.”) | | | | Editor’s Picks | The New Yorker Documentary The Romance of American Activism in “Radical Love”William Kirkley’s documentary follows a married couple working on behalf of the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and others during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Film by William Kirkley Text by Hannah Aizenman | | Cultural Comment The Problem of Marital LonelinessThe new “Scenes from a Marriage,” on HBO, avoids the dark questions that Ingmar Bergman confronted in the original. Agnes Callard asks, “Can any marriage survive an honest reckoning with itself?” By Agnes Callard | | | | | Movie Club |  The Front Row Sixty-two of the Best Documentaries of All TimeFrom 2020: The idea of what a documentary is has shifted according to what has—and hasn’t—been possible during the past hundred years. By Richard Brody | | | | | Dept. of Delight | |  - “The colors in many of Kali’s images seem to shimmer, as if pulsing with their own internal heartbeat.” Naomi Fry writes about the California photographer Kali, who experimented with black-and-white prints in the late sixties and early seventies, in her back-yard pool, “an outsized witch’s cauldron that she’d fill with a variety of dyes, streaking the prints in vibrant colors . . . and, later, treating them with spray paints and with varied natural elements, such as sand, sawdust, dirt, and bugs.”
- The Brooklyn Academy of Music recently posted a call for people who wanted to play beachgoers in the avant-garde climate-crisis opera “Sun & Sea.” The job alert read: “No experience necessary. Requirements include: ability to lie on a beach for several hours.” André Wheeler attended the show’s opening night.
| | | | Fun & Games Dept. |  Name Drop Play Today’s Quiz The fewer clues you need, the more points you receive. By Liz Maynes-Aminzade |  Daily Shouts Go Bags of the Stars What Kanye West, Melania Trump, and others grab when the going gets tough. By Henry Alford | |  Crossword A Moderately Challenging Puzzle Word on U.S. coinage: four letters. By Elizabeth C. Gorski |  Daily Cartoon Wednesday, October 13th By Madeline Horwath | | | | | | P.S. Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” premièred on Broadway on this day in 1962. Albee was profiled in 2005 by Larissa MacFarquhar, who wrote about his precise, controlling nature—“actors can be reluctant to work with him: he can direct as though teaching cows to speak.” Once, MacFarquhar writes, he accepted ten thousand pounds from Volvo to write a short story for an advertising campaign, “but he purposely wrote a story that was so hilariously dreadful that Volvo declined to use it.” | | | | Today’s newsletter was written by Jessie Li. | | | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment