Athough Watter Launt Palmer was only seventeen years old in 1871, when he painted this canvas, he had already developed a vision distinct from his two monumental influences. In Albany in the Snow he mimicked neither the romanticism of his father, the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer, nor the heroic idealism of his employer, the painter Frederic Church. Instead, Palmer conjured a commonplace scene that perhaps speaks more directly to us than do the works of his illustrious mentors.
For most of this century, and often against the starkest evidence, New York City has persisted in seeing itself as “Baghdad on the Subway,” an Arabian Nights swirl of color, motion, tough characters with soft hearts, soft characters with sturdy hearts, tinsel, tears, and laughter. This is largely O. Henry’s doing. It was his stories, his portrait of the city in the decade ending in 1910—its shopgirls named Delia, Delia, or Dulcie, its derelicts and cops, its struggling, forever loyal couples, its ambitious artists and showgirls, its neighborhood streets and parks, its boarding houses and furnished rooms, its “sports” and “swells"—that gave New York much of the jaunty, plucky, raffish image it wears to this day.
Byron Dobell occasionally likes to talk about the Old Editors’ Home, the big red-brick Georgian building up in the Finger Lakes on whose porch veterans of this profession while away the days recalling past triumphs—a particularly felicitous caption, the perfectly seductive subhead—and trying to catch each other misusing the word coruscate or fortuitous .
Well, you won’t find Byron there. When, a few weeks back, he said he had decided to step down as editor of American Heritage, it was not to join colleagues from Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post but to become a portraitist. For years he has been a highly skilled amateur painter; and now the “amateur” will drop away from that description.
Its founding fathers are dead, its disciples scattered, its millions long spent. Yet countless Americans still carry the revolutionary message of new math in their memories, if not always close to their hearts. Now in their mid-30s or 40s, these “new math kids,” myself among them, were part of a learning crusade that in the 1950s and 1960s marched through schools across the nation. For many of us, new math was a disaster; for others, a godsend.
Before the results could even be measured, new math became a near religion, complete with its own high priests and heresies. Chief among the hierophants were the University of Illinois’s Max Beberman and Stanford’s Edward Begle. Together with mathematicians and educators at universities in New York, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Maryland, they took aim at the mindless rigidity of traditional mathematics. They argued that math could be exciting if it showed children the whys of problem solving rather than just the hows. Memorization and rote were wrong. Discovery, deduction, and limited drill were the best routes to arithmetical mastery.
One feature of new-math logic involved sets, groupings of things. For example, in Set A, list all the four-legged objects in the living room.
A = chair, sofa, dog, table
In Set B, list all the animate objects in the living room:
B = dog, Aunt Jane
The intersection of Sets A and B is written as:
A ∩ B = dog
Sets are never added, subtracted, or multiplied; they are intersected, united, or complemented. The union of Sets A and B is written as:
A ∪ B = chair, sofa, dog, table, Aunt Jane
Teachers believed that by helping students understand collections of things, students could better understand the symbolism of numbers expressed as numerals.
Another important new-math feature was the attempt to explain how number systems worked. One way to make our decimal system clear is with expanded notation:
352 = (3 x 10 x 10) + (5 x 10) + (2x1)
I have no doubt. My mystery is why after the S&L robberies, those from HUD, the revolving-door larceny at the Pentagon, and, of course, Wedtech, the Reagan administration isn’t pictured as the most corrupt in our history and by the billions. And why this distinction still belongs to poor old Harding. The solution, of course, is for all to abandon the design of Ronald Reagan, which is to substitute the script for the reality.
An awareness of public relations considerations hasn’t been lacking
in American political practice, from the time of Sam Adams and the Boston Tea Party on. Only in our own day, though, have we seen such considerations threatening to control events to an alarmingly increased extent.
Quite possibly as planned dramatic background for President Reagan’s State of the Union address, originally scheduled for January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was sent aloft despite weather too cold for hours beforehand to promise favorable conditions for a launching. There was no disclosure then or later of what last-minute messages may have gone from the White House to NASA executives at Huntsville, Alabama, or to officials at Cape Canaveral, bearing on the takeoff decision.
Now that the Cold War is over, I’d love to have access to whatever archives there are in the Kremlin that would settle the question of what the Soviet Union’s foreign-policy intentions were between the end of World War II and the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. I grew up watching liberals and conservatives argue inconclusively over whether the Soviets were trying to build an empire for all the standard reasons or just protecting themselves against a repeat of the nightmare of the war. In particular, I’d like to know whether the Soviets were trying to develop a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States, along with a domestic civil-defense system designed with the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war in mind. It’s purely a what-if question because the Soviets’ internal weaknesses seem to have forced them to abandon whatever overarching foreign-policy strategy they had during the Cold War, but it’s still compelling because the Cold War so strongly affected the whole tenor of life in this country (and the rest of the world, for that matter) during the postwar period.
Those who see Governor Mario Cuomo of New York for the first time are likely to be surprised. Led to expect a short man with baggy eyes (someone, in his own words, with the appearance of a “tired frog”), they are startled to meet a goodlooking six-footer with the physique of a linebacker. He emanates the tightly coiled kinetic energy of a football player a few seconds before kickoff. Yet, at the same time, he’s a comfortable man to be with. Indeed, he carries self-effacement and self-scrutiny almost to a fault. His office is unexpectedly modest too. He has shunned the huge, ornate “Red Room” his predecessors had inhabited for an inconsiderable, though pleasant, adjacent retreat.