Photographer: Nadav Kander

2008 British Olympic swimmer Gregor Tait.

Recommended

Highly, especially for Jim Thompson fans.
Also recommended from NYRB: Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock.

Illustrator: Christopher Silas Neal

Ad Reinhart

Photo: John Loengard/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images
Reinhardt working on one of his “black” paintings in July 1966.
NYTimes:

From his notebooks and letters, we know how Reinhardt siphoned off most of the oil from his oil paint to achieve a powdery surface. We also know that he added small quantities of color to his blacks in order to differentiate them. And we know how he applied his paint with carefully layered strokes to create the illusion of an unstroked surface. The black paintings are delicate: the mere touch of a finger leaves a permanent imprint. Their fragility contributed to them being perceived, and valued, as pure things in a corrupted world.

Diving

Photo: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
NYTimes: David Boudia, Thomas Finchum Synchronized Platform Diving, United States 2007 Pan American Games Gold Medalists.

Crete

Photo: Yannis Kolesidis for The New York Times
Palaikastro is a village of 800 on the eastern end of Crete. Nearby is a Minoan-era settlement that may have been as large as Knossos.

Michael Phelps

Photo: Finlay MacKay
New York Times:

BUILDING THE PERFECT MACHINE: Bob Bowman has made Phelps his consuming project.
Phelps — owner of a dozen world and American swimming records; winner of six gold and two bronze medals in Athens in 2004; odds-on favorite to accumulate more such jewelry this month in Beijing — must, at some point, come up for air.

Phelps — owner of a dozen world and American swimming records; winner of six gold and two bronze medals in Athens in 2004; odds-on favorite to accumulate more such jewelry this month in Beijing — must, at some point, come up for air. Or so you would think. But as you stare at the eerily still surface of the new pool at the Qwest Center in Omaha, into which Phelps has just lunged, it is possible to imagine, momentarily, that the figure undulating like a mass of kelp in the shallows of Lane 5 might just prefer to stay put, indefinitely, there in his element. I was watching a video from June 29, cueing the finals of the 400-meter individual medley at the United States Olympic Team Trials again and again with the hope of determining, somehow, the precise factors that enable Phelps to thrive, as few ever have, in an environment so unaccommodating to humans.

It’s not a simple task. Of all Olympic sports, competitive swimming is perhaps the most resistant to casual analysis. When the contestants are not entirely submerged, they are typically face-down; the strokes they carve through the water tend to look the same, and much of what they do is in any case concealed by the splash of their effort. Unless you have an intimate knowledge of the athletes, there are few physical characteristics to distinguish one form in the water from another, an effect compounded by body shaving and the uniform of caps, goggles and bodysuits. (The new, much-publicized Speedo LZR bodysuit that Phelps wears, for instance, is a peculiar cross between a piece of lingerie and a tourniquet; fabricated by ultrasonic welding rather than by stitching, it molds the swimmer’s trunk into a drag-reducing form, can take 20 minutes to don and is proving to be a great improvement, speedwise, on old fashioned, no-tech skin.)

Hunter Parrish

As Silas Botwin
Weeds
Photo: Sheryl Nields/Showtime

Illustrator: Barry Blitt

click for enlarged image

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Hilzoy via Andrew Sullivan:

I imagine that it often happens that soldiers who are part of the same unit do not like one another. Sometimes, a soldier might even despise another member of his or her unit, or think that other soldier immoral or contemptible. And yet, when these feelings do not have to do with sexual orientation, we routinely expect soldiers to put their personal feelings aside and do their jobs. And when they don't, we assume that they, not the people they endanger, should be disciplined.

If, for instance, a soldier is racist, and cannot find a way to work with African-American soldiers, we do not discipline or expel the African-Americans. If a soldier dislikes another and cannot put her feelings aside and do her job, we do not punish the soldier she dislikes; we punish her. In all other cases, we assume that given a choice between two soldiers, one of whom is trying to complete his mission to the best of his ability, and one of whom is unable or unwilling to put his animosity aside and do his job, we choose the first. We expect this of our men and women in uniform, and we also expect that they will be given the training and the leadership they need to act like professionals.

I have never understood why it's different when gay men and lesbians enter the picture.

Obama Addresses 200,000 in Berlin

Germany

Illustrator: Ron Barrett

Baghdad

Ssg. Lorie Jewell/U.S. Army, via Associated Press
Senator Barack Obama with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq, in a helicopter above Baghdad.

NYTimes:
In Iraq, controversy has reverberated between the United States and Iraqi governments over a weekend news report that Mr. Maliki had expressed support for Mr. Obama’s proposal to withdraw American combat troops within 16 months of January. The reported comments came after Mr. Bush agreed on Friday to a “general time horizon” for pulling out troops from Iraq without a specific timeline.

Diplomats from the [Bush administration's] United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki’s advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss what he called diplomatic communications.

After that, the government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine’s rendering of the interview.

The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki’s words had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” but it failed to cite specifics. “Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”

But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.

The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”

He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

Mr. Maliki’s top political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, declined to comment on the remarks, but spoke in general about the Iraqi position on Sunday. Part of that position, he said, comes from domestic political pressure to withdraw.

“Foreign soldiers in the middle of the most populated areas are not without their side effects,” he said. ”Shouldn’t we look to an end for this unhealthy situation?”

Earth's moon: July 1969