Making the rounds
We're back in SF now, but I might break this up into a couple of posts since I didn't have much of a chance to blog in our last days in New York. For most of the time in Manhattan, Walt spent the days with Devon and I went to my conference; Walt is now getting to be quite expert at the playgrounds in Central Park (of which there are huge numbers). We did see several friends in the evenings, though, which was a lot of fun for all of us.
It turned out that my friend Mayra was teaching a class on derivatives on Wednesday evening that was, literally, across the street from our hotel. Mayra is a total sterotype of the American dream: her parents, who don't speak English, emigrated from Mexico and Mayra was the first child in her family to go to college. She went to Harvard and then got a MBA from the Lauder Institute at Wharton, which is a very elite international business program that requires all students to be fluent in at least one other foreign language (Mayra's language for Lauder was not, as you're probably thinking, Spanish but Russian!).
She's spent her life in finance and has lived all over the world; I first met Mayra in Israel when I was a Wallenberg fellow and have kept in intermittent touch with her since. Right now she's teaching finance classes and working on a variety of international business projects -- she was recently in Bolivia and Sudan (which, even by Mayra's standards, is apparently a really difficult place to live and travel). It was great to catch up with her (albeit quickly), and we made a date for a follow up brunch at her new apartment. She just purchased a place in Harlem that is, in her words, "...a terrace that just happens to have an apartment attached to it." In New York, any outdoor space is precious.
On Thursday we went uptown to have dinner with our friends June and David who have a son, Theo, who's about 3-1/2. June, David and I all went to school together and had fun not only catching up with them but also passing on college gossip. The most interesting bombshell came from not from one of us but from the NY Times; one of our classmates published a novel, in French, that's over 900 pages long and is about, roughly, the memoirs of an unrepentant SS officer and it's the toast of the Frankfurt book fair. The funny thing about this is that this guy created the moniker "Chateau" for himself in college, and I was so used to remembering him by that name that I didn't recognize him at all by his real name, Jonathan Littell, even though I had read the paper last Monday and even saw his photo next to the article.
[On an entirely unrelated note, speaking of 900 p. novels, I just finished "David Copperfield" and loved it. I suspect that Dickens was something like the Danielle Steel of his day; his serialized format has tons of cliffhangers and dramatic twists and turns, and I got entirely sucked in to it. It was delightful, and if Devon had actually slept more on the plane home I might have finished it then and there.]
Walt, Devon and I actually ran into David and Theo at the subway station at Columbus Circle. We had gone there because there's a huge, fancy new Time Warner complex there with lots of fancy restaurants and shops, including a Whole Foods (plus Per Se and dozens of other fabulous restaurants). We had planned to get a bottle of wine for dinner, but once I got in there I was told they had closed their wine shop. Huh? I can't believe that Whole Foods in Manhattan didn't have a market for wine. I had to go down to a liquor store on Broadway and 57th to get it -- but the good thing about that was we serendipitously ran into Dave and Theo as they were about to go down into the subway station. We got a guided tour of the 1 train and were shepherded right into their building.
David teaches at Columbia, and they have an apartment that's subsidized by the university (apparently this is standard practice for New York universities, since the cost of living is so high that most academic salaries just don't allow people to live anywhere halfway decent). The way these apartments work is that when a new faculty member is hired (like Dave), s/he gets to select an apartment from those that are available -- so it's entirely up to luck as to which apartments in which buildings are available when you happen to need one. June and Dave got lucky, at least as far as I can tell (I can't compare with other Columbia apartments), with a really big 2 bedroom apartment with good architectural details and some modern amenities (like a dishwasher for instance). June, who is an architect, seemed quite happy with the place as well, which is saying something.
I also had a really interesting conversation with Dave about the formation of galaxies. I mentioned that I had heard some commentary on NPR about the two guys who won the most recent Nobel prize for physics; I had remembered it specifically because they built on the work of Arno Penzias, who is the stepfather of a friend of mine from college. The work of these two scientists confirmed the big bang theory and also shed light on why galaxies cluster together, so you see clumps of galaxies and not just a uniform wash of them. I had asked Dave about this a bit, and it turned out that one of his specialities is the creation of galaxies (how convenient!) and he ended up showing us a simulation movie of galaxy creation that was really amazing.
I know next to nothing about physics, but I always find that talking to Dave, who studies things that are so immense it's almost incomprehsible, gives me real perspective. Even though physicists are as petty as anyone, it must be nice to have work that really helps remind you of how many other things are happening in our universe and others. I remember asking him once if he thought there was life on other planets, and he immediately said, "Yes." And I thought, of course, if I studied not only the Milky Way but hundreds upon thousands of other galaxies, how could I not think that there was sentient life outside of Earth? The universe is just too vast for you not to have that open as a possibility.
We had such a nice time with them, and Devon had such fun playing with Theo, that when we finally looked at our watches it was after 10 pm. Whoops. Devon's sleep schedule was totally blown by then (no wonder she and Theo seemed to be having so much fun jumping on the couch), but we did take a cab back to the hotel to try to salvage a bit of time so we didn't get her in bed past eleven.
It turned out that my friend Mayra was teaching a class on derivatives on Wednesday evening that was, literally, across the street from our hotel. Mayra is a total sterotype of the American dream: her parents, who don't speak English, emigrated from Mexico and Mayra was the first child in her family to go to college. She went to Harvard and then got a MBA from the Lauder Institute at Wharton, which is a very elite international business program that requires all students to be fluent in at least one other foreign language (Mayra's language for Lauder was not, as you're probably thinking, Spanish but Russian!).
She's spent her life in finance and has lived all over the world; I first met Mayra in Israel when I was a Wallenberg fellow and have kept in intermittent touch with her since. Right now she's teaching finance classes and working on a variety of international business projects -- she was recently in Bolivia and Sudan (which, even by Mayra's standards, is apparently a really difficult place to live and travel). It was great to catch up with her (albeit quickly), and we made a date for a follow up brunch at her new apartment. She just purchased a place in Harlem that is, in her words, "...a terrace that just happens to have an apartment attached to it." In New York, any outdoor space is precious.
On Thursday we went uptown to have dinner with our friends June and David who have a son, Theo, who's about 3-1/2. June, David and I all went to school together and had fun not only catching up with them but also passing on college gossip. The most interesting bombshell came from not from one of us but from the NY Times; one of our classmates published a novel, in French, that's over 900 pages long and is about, roughly, the memoirs of an unrepentant SS officer and it's the toast of the Frankfurt book fair. The funny thing about this is that this guy created the moniker "Chateau" for himself in college, and I was so used to remembering him by that name that I didn't recognize him at all by his real name, Jonathan Littell, even though I had read the paper last Monday and even saw his photo next to the article.
[On an entirely unrelated note, speaking of 900 p. novels, I just finished "David Copperfield" and loved it. I suspect that Dickens was something like the Danielle Steel of his day; his serialized format has tons of cliffhangers and dramatic twists and turns, and I got entirely sucked in to it. It was delightful, and if Devon had actually slept more on the plane home I might have finished it then and there.]
Walt, Devon and I actually ran into David and Theo at the subway station at Columbus Circle. We had gone there because there's a huge, fancy new Time Warner complex there with lots of fancy restaurants and shops, including a Whole Foods (plus Per Se and dozens of other fabulous restaurants). We had planned to get a bottle of wine for dinner, but once I got in there I was told they had closed their wine shop. Huh? I can't believe that Whole Foods in Manhattan didn't have a market for wine. I had to go down to a liquor store on Broadway and 57th to get it -- but the good thing about that was we serendipitously ran into Dave and Theo as they were about to go down into the subway station. We got a guided tour of the 1 train and were shepherded right into their building.
David teaches at Columbia, and they have an apartment that's subsidized by the university (apparently this is standard practice for New York universities, since the cost of living is so high that most academic salaries just don't allow people to live anywhere halfway decent). The way these apartments work is that when a new faculty member is hired (like Dave), s/he gets to select an apartment from those that are available -- so it's entirely up to luck as to which apartments in which buildings are available when you happen to need one. June and Dave got lucky, at least as far as I can tell (I can't compare with other Columbia apartments), with a really big 2 bedroom apartment with good architectural details and some modern amenities (like a dishwasher for instance). June, who is an architect, seemed quite happy with the place as well, which is saying something.
I also had a really interesting conversation with Dave about the formation of galaxies. I mentioned that I had heard some commentary on NPR about the two guys who won the most recent Nobel prize for physics; I had remembered it specifically because they built on the work of Arno Penzias, who is the stepfather of a friend of mine from college. The work of these two scientists confirmed the big bang theory and also shed light on why galaxies cluster together, so you see clumps of galaxies and not just a uniform wash of them. I had asked Dave about this a bit, and it turned out that one of his specialities is the creation of galaxies (how convenient!) and he ended up showing us a simulation movie of galaxy creation that was really amazing.
I know next to nothing about physics, but I always find that talking to Dave, who studies things that are so immense it's almost incomprehsible, gives me real perspective. Even though physicists are as petty as anyone, it must be nice to have work that really helps remind you of how many other things are happening in our universe and others. I remember asking him once if he thought there was life on other planets, and he immediately said, "Yes." And I thought, of course, if I studied not only the Milky Way but hundreds upon thousands of other galaxies, how could I not think that there was sentient life outside of Earth? The universe is just too vast for you not to have that open as a possibility.
We had such a nice time with them, and Devon had such fun playing with Theo, that when we finally looked at our watches it was after 10 pm. Whoops. Devon's sleep schedule was totally blown by then (no wonder she and Theo seemed to be having so much fun jumping on the couch), but we did take a cab back to the hotel to try to salvage a bit of time so we didn't get her in bed past eleven.
posted by Devon Szalva at
8:24 PM
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