Ping-Pong Wizard
Yesterday, Marty Reisman, one of the greatest ping pong players of all time, died at the age of 82. In an essay from Jewish Jocks, a new book about important Jewish sports figures edited by TNR’s Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy, novelist Howard Jacobson looks back on the career of a phenomenal athlete and a romantic evangelist for his game. READ MORE >>
Whiff-Whaff
Restoration
This Is No Rout
And so it has turned out. After a blackly farcical day, with voters being shut out of polling booths, voting forms inexplicably running out, and a UK Independence Party Candidate crashing in a Polish-built light aircraft as a consequence of his banner—“Vote for Your Country”—getting snagged on the tailplane, the country staggers towards a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. READ MORE >>
The Government We Deserve
If an election is a battle for the soul of a country, the question one's left asking after this election is whether Britain in 2010 has a soul to battle over. Where were the big ideas? Where was the conviction of high purpose? Where was the heart? READ MORE >>
Blair Ghost Project
Gordon Brown has now been British prime minister for two years. This is hard to credit, partly because he has not fully emerged from the detachable Peter Pan shadow of Tony Blair, but mainly because he has not yet emerged from his own. He walks in a deep, impenetrable penumbra of his own making. READ MORE >>
Pox Britannica
'England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks," says Nathan Zuckerman on the last page of Philip Roth's The Counterlife. It is not meant to be a compliment. What makes a Jew of Zuckerman is the "strong sense of difference" the English induce in him, a "latent and pervasive" anti-Semitism, rarely rampantly expressed except for a "peculiarly immoderate, un-English-like Israel-loathing." READ MORE >>
The Beautiful Game
In the popular imagination, table tennis has never recovered from its origins as a parlor game. Because it lacks the costly glamour of lawn tennis, because you can do it on a dining room table, because people who can't play always think they can, and because it's watched at the highest level only by those who play it at the highest level, table tennis remains a joke: ping-pong--which, to lovers of the game, equates to calling grand opera sing-song. READ MORE >>
