Like Romans Applauding Lions

Once you begin to consider the natural world at a molecular level, the boundaries that separate one fruit from another begin to seem like artifice. Givaudan’s many scientists often refer to food as “the application,” as if it were composed of malleable lines of computer code; from this perspective, adding a flavor is as simple as updating software. A garden strawberry turns out to be a very complicated application, made up of hundreds of differing molecules — some of them highly volatile, some of them inert to our senses — but among the ones that seem to matter most very few are exclusive to the strawberry.

In the simplest sense, a blood chit is a prepared message, written in local languages, that a lost service member can present to most anyone who might help. It offers a rough description of the predicament – “I am not from here and would like to get back to where I belong” – along with both a request for aid and the promise of a reward for assistance. The chits are carried by many air crews, particularly fixed-wing air crews, and by other service members deemed to be at what the military calls “high risk of isolation.”

LaGuardia Airport is tiny compared to its sleek modern counterparts, like Atlanta or Denver with their endless parallel runways spread over thousands of acres. LaGuardia is jammed into just 680 urban acres; taxiways are tight; runways intersect; you can’t launch a departure until the arrival on the other runway crosses the threshold or else the airplanes will…collide. There’s also water on three sides to avoid falling into. There’s also adjacent behemoths Newark and (especially) Kennedy airports, each launching and landing one plane every thirty-six seconds, constantly breathing down LaGuardia’s neck. Kennedy, just twelve miles south, is obnoxious. If Kennedy goes into delays, it’s LaGuardia that has to change its runway configuration to help Kennedy get out of delays. All in all, the complications make this place so much more awesome than a place like Atlanta or Denver. This, anyway, is the LaGuardia mystique.

In the executive dining room of the Time Life Building, Don and Megan grift Heinz. Noted science-fiction writer Ken Cosgrove fluffs the clients between drinks and passes to Don for an alley-oop while he paints the scene. Megan masterfully tops from the bottom, paving a way into Don’s beans speech and then demurely beaming at him by his side. Suddenly the Don Draper show is a double act. Dinner becomes triumphant. Champagne is popped and fizzes all over the boundaries between Don and Megan’s sex and work lives. Boundaries, like cubicles, are mostly symbolic. They tend to inspire more transgression than they prevent.