Another New York summer has passed: gone are the warm nights of stoop sitting; gone are the free concerts and outdoor movies and endless scrambles to claim picnic blanket space; and gone, too, are the Jews for Jesus.

For the 36th straight year, Jews for Jesus traveled here for their “Summer Witnessing Campaign.” They prepared in June with a two-week training at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a boot camp for “the Lord’s army," as their website puts it, that equips evangelical soldiers with the strength needed to withstand “the winds of rejection and opposition that are a regular part of the Summer Witnessing Campaign.” Each day began with calisthenics and marching. They studied the Bible and learned to identify with Jesus; His suffering on the cross was just as theirs would be on the streets of New York. Read More

Find your favorite pair of lips and, asking nicely, have them sing it for you in an Italian whisper: Cinquecento. The mouth starts with a smile, puckers boozily in the middle and finishes open, full of possibility. And that's just the name. With the Fiat 500 predicted to arrive in what's left of Chrysler's showrooms in 2010 and to start American-based production (perhaps in North America, perhaps in South America) in 2011, it's time to consider what Cinquecento has in store for us.

The original Cinquecento debuted in 1957, when tail fins reigned supreme and Europeans wanted to build domestic car industries to restore their national pride and an industrial base. Where the Beetle's signature style flowed from its redundant roundness—the eminently sensible curved roof was playfully replicated in hemispherical fenders—the key to the Cinquecento's styling was all up front.

Most modern cars have a hood that lands flat between integrated fenders. But the original Cinquecento, as well as the new Cinquecento that debuted in Italy in 2007, feature a cowl-shaped hood that sits atop the fender panels. This little touch suggests the there is something powerful beneath, too powerful to be contained below a mere flat hood. Could it be the Supercharged V-8 of a 30s Cord? Might there be a powerful flathead Ford under there? Well, no. The engine's a pretty tiny 1.2 (the original was air-cooled and in the back) and it sips gas. A base model does 45 MPG on the highway with an eco-gas engine rated at 55 MPG and a diesel at 65. But the effect is of a car that very much wants to be all grown-up. The shape is at once cherubic and full of hormonal energy. Read More

I first saw a pro football game live when I was thirteen or fourteen, and my strongest impression, aside from the cold, was the lack of instant replay. Football was so complicated; there were so many people on each side hitting one another, and so quickly; the experience of watching every play just once seemed bare, untextured, more of an anti-experience. I wonder if people who watched all their games live saw them differently. They must have, but it's too late to test the hypothesis, as even the college stadiums have jumbotrons now, with instant replay.

I saw Keri Russell, the star of Felicity, on the train to Flushing Meadows, which seemed like a good sign. But she got off somewhere in Manhattan. There are no celebrities at the qualifying tournament of the US Open. 

Instead there are players who've spent their lives at the game and are struggling to stay in it. All they want are points. Points (along with prize money) are the foundation of professional tennis. They determine the rankings and rankings determine who can play the most point-rich tournaments—so players travel around the world like knights, plotting and training for the wins most likely to maximize their numbers. Read More

After David Foster Wallace's tragic death last September 12, while unburdening my shelf of his works to give them a good nostalgic thumbing-through, I remembered an LP in my collection—plucked several summers ago from the dollar bin of a liquidating Cambridge record store—by an artist with the same name as one of Wallace's most memorable characters. The album, called Priorities, was by Michael Pemulis, whose literary namesake is the twitchy Allstonian best friend cum drug dealer of Hal Incandenza, protagonist of Infinite Jest. Despite the coincidence of names and appealing cover art, the uninspiring bar-band-trapped-in-a-studio sound had caused me to quickly banish Michael Pemulis to the bottom of a milk crate.

When I pulled the album out last September, though, I noticed it had been recorded in Phoenix, where some of Infinite Jest takes place, and released in 1987, the year that Wallace graduated with an MFA from the University of Arizona.

"I've never heard of the author or the book," said Tony Victor, the founder of the label that put out the Pemulis record, via phone from Phoenix. He explained that Pemulis (pronounced ‘PEEM-yoo-lis') was his own brother's stage name and that compared to other Placebo Records artists—among them the influential experimental rock band, Sun City Girls—Pemulis was "very, very not popular." The author, Victor guessed, got the name from a playbill. Read More

More than half a century ago, Randall Jarrell was invited to speak at an academic panel on "The Obscurity of The Modern Poet." The problem the panel's title obviously implied was that "the Modern Poet" had adopted a strategy of willful difficulty, shunning the common reader. Jarrell began his talk with a cheeky misreading, saying that after hearing of the panel's subject,

I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don't read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn't understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. … Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure—i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected—they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry.

I thought of Jarrell and the conflation of difficulty with neglect after reading Time book critic Lev Grossman's rather unfortunate consideration, in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, of the Obscurity of the Modern Novelist. "Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard," would make a fine, snarky dismissal of Grossman's argument, were it not the actual title the Journal had given to the piece. Read More

Late in 2007 I arranged a meeting in Arusha, Tanzania with an American in the travel business. Underneath a pile of titles and affiliations, this big gregarious dude, whom I'll call Morgan, worked to bring tourists to desolate villages, a specialty sometimes called 'poorism.' I'd planned to write a magazine story about delivering tourism dollars to the Barbaig, a polygamous tribe who wear plaid blankets and sandals cut from tires, like the more famous Maasai. Read More