Paris When it Fizzles An exclusive look inside the navel of New Yorker boulevardier Adam Gopnik, the Seinfeld of public intellectuals By Chris Lehmann for devoted readers of the New Yorker an ever-dwindling, masochistic segment of the American reading public there is a unique pleasure that comes along every month or so. They greet an old friend, a regular contributor whose tortured sentences and ...

Have been brooding a lot lately on what I have come to think of as the Two-Cafe Problem. The form is borrowed from the old Three-Body Problem, which perplexed mathematicians late into the nineteenth century, and which, as I vaguely understand it, involved calculating the weird swerves and dodges that three planets worked on each other when the force of gravity was working on them all. My problem ...