With the Sochi Winter Games less than a month away, we are on the lookout for that great Olympic currency: characters, and the personal (and occasionally petty) dramas and rivalries they bring with them. Last week, the spotlight shone on the skier Lindsey Vonn, one of the most famous and accomplished athletes set to return to the Olympics, who will instead be forced to stay home after re-injuring her knee. (Thankfully, there appears to be a worthy replacement in the quickly rising star of the eighteen-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin.)
This weekend, the character drama came from Boston, where the top American figure skaters were competing for this year’s national title and, ostensibly, for a berth in Sochi. Usually, the top finishers in each field—women’s, men’s, pairs, and ice dancing—are chosen for the Olympic team. The U.S. women are allotted three spots in this year’s Olympics, based on the performance of American skaters at the 2013 World Championships. Yet, after the U.S. championship on Sunday, when U.S. Figure Skating announced its selections for the women’s team, the third-place finisher, Mirai Nagasu, had been left out. Instead, Ashley Wagner, a two-time national champion who had been knocked down to fourth place by a bad stumble in her final skate, had been picked to join Gracie Gold and Polina Edmunds, who finished first and second, respectively, in Sochi.
On day six of the great Bridgegate media onslaught, the news isn’t getting any better for Governor Chris Christie. It’s getting worse. On Monday morning, it was reported that he’s facing yet another investigation—this one into the possible misuse of Hurricane Sandy relief funds for political purposes. Meanwhile, a new opinion poll showed that most New Jersey residents believe he knew in advance about the Fort Lee lane closures, and a majority of them think that if this is proven he should resign.
In view of these developments, and the relentless coverage of the scandal, it’s hardly surprising that some observers, from throughout the political spectrum, think Christie is already done for as a 2016 Presidential candidate. Indeed, with his enemies on the right of the G.O.P. eagerly seeking to exploit his problems, and vocal Christie defenders in short supply, this position is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom. “If you thought that Christie’s political future was imperilled last week, you’ve gotta be feeling pretty good about your judgment right now,” Matt Berman, of National Journal, commented on Monday.
If you had a good year, there’s nothing wrong with a little bragging at the end. That is what Aleksandr Malis, the president and C.E.O. of Euroset, Russia’s largest mobile retailer, was presumably thinking when he made a video in December addressed to his employees. With over five thousand stores and about fifty million monthly customers, Euroset is a formidable player in the Russian market. In the video, which runs just under two minutes, Malis, wearing a white shirt, gray suit, and no tie, opens a saucepan to reveal an unappetizing-looking boiled chicken. If the chicken represents the total amount of cash at the market, he says, this is how we divided it—and proceeds to jab a big knife into the bird. “We’ve grabbed all the profit from the market,” he says. “It’s ours.” He cuts away everything but a big, bare bone, “The bone we decided to give to our competitors. But then I thought, I hate to give it to them just like that. I thought, I’d rather shove it up their asses!” In an energetic gesture, he shows just how he would do this. Then, knife in hand, he makes a sharp slash of the air, and concludes, “Euroset must remain on the market alone. All alone!”
In 1930, George Bernard Shaw rose to toast Albert Einstein, and said, “If you take the typical great man of our historic epoch—and suppose I had to rise here tonight to propose a toast of Napoleon. Well, undoubtedly, I could say many, many flattering things about Napoleon.” But about that greatness, Shaw deadpanned, something else would have to be considered, “perhaps the most important thing”: “Which is that it would perhaps have been better for the human race if he had never been born.”
I write as Ariel Sharon’s funeral proceeds; the Israeli media is flooded with flattering memories: he was brave; he was loyal; he was charming; he was headstrong, thus charismatic (even if, at times, he defied commanders and shaded the truth); he was pragmatic; he did his homework, then acted boldly; he could reverse course. None of this changes perhaps the most important thing.
In New York City’s diamond district, behind the glistening jewelry markets and through a maze of narrow corridors, sits a ninety-two-year-old diamond cutter named Max Fuchs. He works quietly at a cutting bench cluttered with blocky metal tools, his hands worn from years of shaping rough stones into modern cuts. As the diamond industry moves abroad for lower-cost labor, Fuchs believes he is among the oldest in an ever-shrinking field of New York diamond cutters. He takes pride in his craft: “You can take a diamond that’s, let’s say, a broken diamond, and you bring it back into shape. … It’s a masterpiece—like Picasso.”
Though I’m not privy to Josh McDaniels’s reading list, I believe it’s safe to say that he hadn’t consumed much Sophocles or Aeschylus prior to beginning his star-crossed tenure as the Denver Broncos’ head coach in 2009. Clearly unversed in the harsh consequences of hubris, McDaniels greatly angered the football gods in his fifth game at the helm in Denver, when the New England Patriots came to town. He had previously served as Bill Belichick’s offensive coördinator, so there was an unavoidable master-versus-pupil narrative to the affair. When the Broncos won with a field goal in overtime, the then thirty-three-year-old wunderkind made the inexcusable mistake of showing genuine emotion—he pumped his fist with vigor before the cheering throng, to Belichick’s obvious disgust. Anyone familiar with football instantly knew that a harsh comeuppance was in store, as coaches are not allowed to crack a celebratory smile until Week Fifteen, at the earliest.
“I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him.” From “Nobody’s Son,” by Mark Slouka.
“Laboring in your head, exclusively, does feel unnatural; whatever else we might have been doing, back out there on the primeval savannah, we weren’t sitting and moving the ends of our fingers minutely on a stone surface for six hours at a stretch.” Adam Gopnik on why authors drink in “Writers and Rum.”
“If Kelly, or anybody else, contradicts Christie and provides evidence to back up his or her story, the governor is toast.” From “Contrite Christie One Story Away from Oblivion,” by John Cassidy.
The story of Alex Rodriguez, over the past decade, has been told in reverse. He began as a sure-thing Hall of Famer, but as he piled up the statistics that should have been the proof of it, his stature in our eyes only became more diminished. A further blow to his legacy was dealt Saturday, with his suspension from baseball for the entire 2014 season, for violating Major League Baseball’s performance-enhancing-drug policy. Now Rodriguez enters a yearlong limbo, presaging the one to come when he joins the other villains of the steroid era in retirement.
At a hundred and sixty-two games, A-Rod’s ban is the longest drug suspension ever handed out by the league. It could have been worse: the original ban, announced by Major League Baseball back in August, was for two hundred and eleven games, but Fredric Horowitz, the arbitrator who heard Rodriguez’s appeal, knocked it down. (The ban also includes the postseason, were the Yankees to reach it.) The punishment is the final flourish in an investigation that the M.L.B. began a year ago, after the Miami New Times uncovered evidence connecting a handful of ballplayers to the Biogenesis anti-aging clinic, in South Florida. Twelve players had already been suspended; A-Rod makes thirteen, the same ill-omened number he wears for the New York Yankees. Rodriguez, in a statement on Saturday, vowed to fight the case in federal court. If the ban sticks, he will be a few months shy of forty the next time he’s eligible to step into the batter’s box during a regular-season game.
I wish I could add a fond remembrance of Larry Speakes, who died Friday at the age of seventy-four, in his home state of Mississippi, after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and who served as Reagan’s press secretary for several of the years when I covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal. There have been plenty of accolades, and I’m sure there will be more. But it’s worth adding a note about how Speakes treated reporters who strayed from the company line. Every White House has its own approach to the press and, in many ways, the Reagan White House was far more accommodating than the Obama White House is, but that was because Reagan’s successive chiefs of staff, including James Baker, Donald Regan, Howard Baker, and Ken Duberstein, all understood that they would get better coverage if they met regularly with reporters for background briefings, which they did, sometimes weekly. Speakes, on the other hand, reveled in cutting off access at the slightest infraction, leaning in to the microphone at the podium in the press room, in front of the curtain bearing the Presidential seal and, with a reddened face and a southern drawl, declaring to whatever reporter had challenged him too aggressively, “You are out of business.”
