The Shorter New Yorker

Fun free stuff from The New Yorker this week:

Jack “Deep Thoughts” [from SNL] Handey plots the perfect bank robbery. What could possibly go wrong?:

The plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen:..

—Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone…
—The monkeys must grab the bags of money and not just shriek and go running all over the place, like they did in the practice run.
—The gold bars must be made out of a lighter kind of gold that’s just as valuable but easier to carry.
—If the police come, they don’t notice that the historical mural on the wall is actually us, holding still.
—When we exit the bank, there must be a parade going by, so our getaway car, which is decorated to look like a float, can blend right in.
—At the rendezvous point, there must be an empty parking space with a meter that takes hundred-dollar bills…

The Artist – and devout Jehovah’s Witness – formerly known as Prince shares his unearthly, “purple” takes on sex and American politics, as a “Talk of the Town” writer tours his new Los Angeles digs, built by none other than Vanna White’s ex. From a sidebar with the reporter:

In your interview, Prince said the following about gay marriage: “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was like, ‘Enough.’” Did you two have a more In-depth conversation about this?

I was a little surprised when he said it, because he has always seemed so unrestricted sexually.

We were having a larger conversation about his belief system and his politics. He told me he didn’t have a horse in the November election and that he didn’t believe in getting involved with these kind of earthly contests. I had asked him if the fact that Obama was black didn’t compel him to get involved.

He said, “Why?”

And I said, Well, because you’re black.

And he said “Am I?” and held up his wrist next to my ruddy one. Indeed his skin was lighter, and he cracked up.

Anyway, he walked me into his library and opened a Bible up to the Sermon on the Mount, and that’s when he got to talking about trying to live Biblically. For what it’s worth, the way he said it wasn’t hateful so much as sad and resigned. Prince is a true believer, and I think that’s important to keep in mind in hearing his viewpoint.

Not free, alas, but abstracted, is Todd Oppenheimer’s profile of one of the world’s master bladesmiths:

ABSTRACT: OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS about master bladesmith Bob Kramer. Bob Kramer is one of a hundred and twenty-two people in the world, and the only former chef, to have been certified in the U.S. as a Master Bladesmith. To earn that title, which is conferred by the American Bladesmith Society (A.B.S.), Kramer underwent five years of study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives, including a fifteen-inch bowie knife. Like a mad alchemist, Kramer, aged fifty, cannot stop tinkering with steel recipes. Last year, Cook’s Illustrated ran a sidebar which stated that the Kramer chef’s knife “outperformed every knife we’ve ever rated.” A few months later, the kitchen-supply chain Sur La Table asked Kramer to design a commercial line of knives, which the store introduced this fall. The writer toured Kramer’s shop. Kramer was absorbed in an attempt to replicate the legendary achievements of Frank J. Richtig, who, in 1936, forged a butcher knife that could cut cold steel and paper. Describes the forging process. On the retail market, Western knives tend to be the softest, with Rockwell ratings in the middle to upper fifties. The Rockwell of a traditional Japanese knife, by contrast, runs in the middle sixties…

Burkhard Bilger, one of our best science journalists, provides one of the magazine’s signature no-stone-unturned Niagara-shooting I-did-not-know-that epics (at c. 9800 words) on the rise of extreme beer, braving everything from feral hogs to wood for aging-barrels so hard the trees growing it repel knives, bullets and a Paraguayan behemoth named Carlos alike:

Calagione was used to odd suggestions from customers. On Monday mornings, his brewery’s answering machine is sometimes full of rambling meditations from fans, in the grips of beery enlightenment at their local bar. But Gasparine’s idea was different. It spoke to Calagione’s own contradictory ambitions for Dogfish: to make beers so potent and unique that they couldn’t be judged by ordinary standards, and to win for them the prestige and premium prices usually reserved for fine wine. And so, a year later, Calagione sent Gasparine back to Paraguay with an order for forty-four hundred board feet of palo santo. “I told him to get a shitload,” he remembers. “We were going to build the biggest wooden barrel since the days of Prohibition.”

Gasparine, by then, had begun to have second thoughts. No lumbermill he knew had ever cut so much palo santo, and he wasn’t sure that any could. Bulnesia sarmientoi is a weedy, willowy tree, sometimes called ironwood. It’s difficult to get large boards out of it, and even small ones can dull a saw blade. Wood experts rate a species’ hardness on the Janka scale—a measure of how many pounds of force it takes to drive a half-inch steel ball halfway into a board. Yellow pine rates around seven hundred, oak twice as high. Palo santo hovers near forty-five hundred—three times as high as rock maple. It’s one of the two or three hardest woods in the world.

Gasparine eventually found some Paraguayans willing to fill the order. On one trip, they took him to the forest where the palo santo grew, a twelve-hour bus ride from Asunción followed by a half day’s drive into the wilderness. Three rough-looking millworkers had agreed to accompany him, led by a bullet-headed giant named Carlos. At one point, a herd of wild boars crossed the road, but Carlos didn’t slow down. He plowed straight over a boar and kept on going.

When they finally arrived, one of the millworkers pulled out a large cooking knife. “He said he was going to prove to me that these were palo-santo trees,” Gasparine remembers. “ ‘We’ll cut away the bark and you can smell it!’ Then he starts hacking away for five or ten minutes. Nothing. Can’t get through the sapwood. So the monster Carlos goes at it. The blade looks like a butter knife in his hand. Nothing.” After a while, Carlos turned to one of his sidekicks and sent him back to the truck. When he returned, he was holding a .38-calibre pistol. “Now I’m a little more than freaked out,” Gasparine says. Carlos took the pistol, swivelled it toward the tree, and fired a single shot from five feet away. The bullet struck with a dull thud, then fell harmlessly to the ground.

The barrel that Dogfish built is now housed at its main brewery, in Milton, Delaware. It’s fifteen feet high and ten feet in diameter, and holds nine thousand gallons…

America used to be full of odd beers. In 1873, the country had some four thousand breweries, working in dozens of regional and ethnic styles. Brooklyn alone had nearly fifty. Beer was not only refreshing but nutritious, it was said—a “valuable substitute for vegetables,” as a member of the United States Sanitary Commission put it during the Civil War. The lagers brewed by Adolphus Busch and Frederick Pabst were among the best. In 1878, Maureen Ogle notes in her recent book “Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer,” Busch’s St. Louis Lager took on more than a hundred European beers at a competition in Paris. The lager came home with the gold, causing an “immense sensation,” in the words of a reporter from the Times.

Then came Prohibition, followed hard by industrialization. Beer went from barrel to bottle and from saloon to home refrigerator, and only the largest companies could afford to manufacture and distribute it. A generation raised on Coca-Cola had a hard time readjusting to beer’s bitterness, and brewers diluted their recipes accordingly. In 1953, Miller High Life was dismissed by one competitor as a beer for “women and beginners.” Within a decade, most other beers were just as flavorless.

Beer has lagged well behind wine and organic produce in the ongoing reinvention of American cuisine. Yet the change over the past twenty years has been startling. In 1965, the United States had a single craft brewery: Anchor Brewing, in San Francisco. Today, there are nearly fifteen hundred. In liquor stores and upscale supermarkets, pumpkin ales and chocolate stouts compete for cooler space with wit beers, weiss beers, and imperial Pilsners. The King of Beers, once served in splendid isolation at many bars, is now surrounded by motley bottles with ridiculous names, like jesters at a Renaissance fair: SkullSplitter, Old Leghumper, Slam Dunkel, Troll Porter, Moose Drool, Power Tool, He’brew, and Ale Mary Full of Taste.

Dogfish is something of a mascot for this unruly movement. In the thirteen years since Calagione founded the brewery, it has gone from being the smallest in the country to the thirty-eighth largest. Calagione makes more beer with at least ten per cent alcohol than any other brewer, and his odd ingredients are often drawn from ancient or obscure beer traditions. The typical Dogfish ale is made with about four times as much grain as an industrial beer (hence its high alcohol content) and about twenty times as much hops (hence its bitterness). It is to Budweiser what a bouillabaisse is to fish stock.

“We are trying to explore the outer edges of what beer can be,” Calagione says. But the idea makes even some craft brewers nervous. “I find the term ‘extreme beer’ irredeemably pejorative,” Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, told me recently. “When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’ ”…

David Grann provides a richly detailed report, from sources inside and out the McCain campaign, on the senator’s manifold afflictions as defeat approached:

People in McCain’s circle wonder how he will cope not only with his defeat but with the perception that he has betrayed his ideals. The longtime friend said, “How does he get up in the morning? Is he at peace, or is it a horrible dark void that he carries with him forever?”

George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in 1972, told me about the anguish he felt when he returned to the Senate—as McCain will soon do. “I thought everyone was either scorning me or pitying me,” McGovern recalled. In 1989, he said, he ran into Walter Mondale, who had lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan five years earlier. “He said, ‘George, how long does it take to get over it after you’ve lost?’ I said, ‘I’ll let you know when I get there.’ ” Ultimately, McGovern said, it was easier to stop brooding knowing that he had tried his “damnedest to win” but had never done anything that “wouldn’t let me sleep at night.”

In the final weekend of the campaign, when it was almost certain that McCain was going to lose, he actually seemed the happiest. He joked and bantered with aides. He appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” irreverently referring to his “strategy called the Reverse Maverick,” in which “I do whatever anyone tells me.”

On the night of his defeat, he gave a concession speech as memorable as the one he had delivered in South Carolina…