Adam Gopnik, on cookbooks, gives the graf of the food issue:

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages — all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night's was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven't been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven't yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that's the game.

Been a while since a New Yorker listing really did it for me:

MOMA has reinstalled Claude Monet's "Water Lilies," a nearly forty-two-foot-long triptych, along with related paintings, in a room of its wondrous own, with a couch. Bring a snorkel. Dry paint never made for wetter effects than in the engulfing expositions of the Giverny ponds and gardens, which filled the last years of the artist, as he adjusted to the handicap of cataracts. (He died in 1926.) Get as close as you like to the nubbly surfaces of the triptych, with its candid brushstrokes that skitter and clot; your gaze will stay drenched in an aqueous sublime. Pinkish summer clouds aren't so much reflected as drowned in turquoise, violet, and mud-green depths. Monet knew palpably, at each point, what all his colors were up to. Everything answers, resoundingly, to everything else. The tone of the next biggest, single-panel panorama is a soprano, silvery shimmer, suggesting water less than polychrome steam.

The more things change… I find myself dog-earring the same corners. From "Complicity," the Julian Barnes story in a New Yorker last week:

I used the word "complicity" a bit ago. I like the word. To me, it indicates an unspoken understanding between two people, a kind of pre-sense, if you like. The first hint that you may be suited, before the nervous trudgery of finding out whether you "share the same interests," or have the same metabolism, or are sexually compatible, or both want children, or however it is that we argue consciously about our unconscious decisions. Later, looking back, we will fetishize and celebrate the first date, the first kiss, the first holiday together, but what really counts is what happened before this public story: that moment, more of pulse than of thought, which goes, Yes, perhaps her, and Yes, perhaps him.

I tried to explain this to Ben, a few days after his party. Ben is a crossword-doer, a dictionary lover, a pedant. He told me that "complicity" means a shared involvement in a crime or a sin or a nefarious act. It means planning to do something bad.

I prefer to keep the term as I understand it. For me, it means planning to do something good. She and I were both free adults, capable of making our own decisions. And nobody plans to do anything bad at that moment, do they?

The story reminds me of one I cut from Tribune's short-story contest 10 or 11 years ago and probably still have in a box somewhere — Sharon Wahl's "I Also Dated Zarathustra." I liked the story then but, then 18, didn't get much of it. Here are the two grafs I got and the subsequent one I didn't grasp, like the rest of the story, until rereading this week:

It was a warm night, with lots of neon. It was one of those nights when the world seemed to be made not of people, but of couples. Everywhere I looked bodies were paired together, connected at the hands or more tightly around the waist, awkward animals walking with a tilt and lean, off-balance, unsymmetrical. They reminded me of those children's books with the pages cut in three, each section the top, middle, or bottom of an animal, so that the normal old heads and legs and bellies could be made into sillier creatures: a salamousowl, a girelephish, a pandazebrogator.

And yes, I wanted to be part of it all. Of course I did. Oh, to be damply interlaced at the palms. To be affectionately leashed, tethered in the crowded streets, appended. To make a wider obstacle on the sidewalk, a wandering self-absorption that others had to navigate, rather than this narrow thing that darts and slips politely by.

But Zarathustra understood nothing of this. He would walk between or duck under the arms of people clearly together, something I by instinct could not do. It was impossible to truly accompany him, to predict and accommodate his walking speeds or stopping places. He seemed to resent being tied down, even by gravity. He walked with high fast steps and frequently bumped into things. Really he couldn't see very well; until he was at arm's length he wasn't completely certain what he was looking at. This meant that everything out of reach was immensely interesting, and the things close by merely obstacles.

NYer: "As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six o'clock films and nine o'clock films. Most movies are nine-o'clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat, and head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed — alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw onscreen. A six o'clock movie requires more organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You're going to need them, because if all runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie — the impact and substance of it — back and forth."

A few lines later in the piece: "'The Reader' is a nine o'clock movie that thinks its a six o'clock. 'Groundhog Day' is the opposite."

I fell off the wagon last September, after a July and August of too much reading, one month's actions causing the other. I read a couple issues every month after, but that was no pace. For each double issue, there were big single issues and busy or lazy weeks. The magazines stacked higher than ever and by spring the pile was steadily around two dozen issues. The coffee table monster had to flee to a shelf, embarrassed.

The worst part was your question, "What have you been reading?" My reply had long been: book on vacation, New Yorker the rest of the year.

Who knew the answer for rising magazines wasn't staying in but going out? The change began there. Every plane become one or two or three issues. Time between activity — later or tomorrow — created deadlines for reading. Split hours returned, enough to read the back of the book, then front, then middle in different sittings. The cartoon contest, critics, table of contents, contributors, listings, Talk of the Town, money page, articles, fiction — everything, no skips. Double time became possible.

Approaching New Yorker zero, the final issues were the past week and then an issue from October 13. The last sentence before zero came in the fiction today: "They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness." After noting the dog-ear elsewhere inside, I threw the issue away.

From the man likely to be the next Canadian PM (emphasis his):

The thing that politics most strongly resembles is being on soccer teams and hockey teams when I was a child. It's not a lonely writer in his den thinking thoughts. You're mostly listening all day long to people, trying to take the measure of their personalities — their strengths, their weaknesses. It's much closer to being a journalist. You sit with other politicians: what does this person really want? You hear what she's saying. But what does she really want? That's a political moment. You're in a town hall with two hundred and fifty people, and you're trying to get a sense of the room, of what makes these people tick. It's a very different skill from being a writer. Isaiah himself was fascinated by the question: what is it that a great politician knows? What is that form of knowledge? Last night, Zsuzsanna and I were watching the Detroit Red Wings goalie, and he knows something: what is it that he knows? What is it that a great politician knows? The great ones have a skill that is just jaw-dropping, and I'm trying to learn that.

That's the question all young professional journalists should be asking themselves today. At 26, Lester's the new managing editor of The New Yorker. She succeeds a woman who's about 30. Remnick's magazine is already my favorite, as you know, and is now even more so. But along with Washingtonian naming 28-year-old Garrett Graff editor in chief, the news should make other young journalists question their own leaders.

If powers-that-be have trouble hiring or promoting management under 35, what's wrong with them? Have you subordinated yourself to legacy without realizing, and have you underestimated your potential to lead?

Nearly every weekday morning for the last two weeks, I talked with Joe from Uganda about a different aspect of sleep. We were fellow early risers. and often breakfast would be just us, staff ("Morgen!") and whatever random friend that day had lucked into the sunrise.

For me, how could I have slept in? Every morning there was a palace, a lake and a mountain outside. I never closed my room windows and slept half the nights on top of the sheets. For Joe, as he put it, sleep and he were not friends. We talked about sleep hours, sleeping and meals, dream diaries, life-stage sleep, the trouble with napping, REM tracking, and shared hopes of one day participating in sleep studies.

With that recent context, I liked running across this Updike passage:

Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, or one's bed partner shifting position on the remarkably noisy sheets. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams' uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unraveling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. The brain, circling in the cell of wakefulness, panics at the poverty of its domain — these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Life itself, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity, a hellish endless churning, in which one is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on every side the wide world gently, blessedly snores.

The line in the front of The New Yorker was always the same. At the Iridium, in the listings, every issue, without fail, "Mondays belong to electric-guitar innovator Les Paul." Until recent issues. Obsessively if not punctually reading from cover to cover, I read the last issue I received before I left the country, and the line wasn't there.

I wondered why it was gone, and now Les Paul is dead. Googling, "Mondays belong to electric-guitar innovator Les Paul" dates back to 1997, word for word. Before that, the lines varied — "Mondays belong to Les Paul," "Mondays belong to great Les Paul," "Now and for the forseeable future, Mondays belong to Les Paul," "The great Les Paul holds court on Mondays," "Les Paul holds down the fort every Monday," "Les Paul entertains on Mondays," "Les Paul is your man every Monday," "Les Paul owns the joint every Monday." In 1994 and 1995, "On Mondays, electric-guitar innovator Les Paul leads a trio." From 1989 to 1993, they called him "the Thomas Edison of reverb." Archive searching traced Monday nights in Paul's possession to 1984.

Les Paul was 94.

"When rhyme goes against character, out it should go." –Sondheim, on his regret of I Feel Pretty's too-good internal rhymes in West Side Story.

Also on the topic of modulating self-expression, I'm happy when Louise Gluck is happy — sexy "At the Dance," in Slate's weekly poetry feature.