Over the last two years, there has been a covert study of the lives of gay men in an unnamed country in the “Middle East.”

by David Parker

It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog to use an iPad.

For the last two weeks, Anna has been spending more time than usual with José de Sousa Saramago, the Portuguese water dog she named after her favorite writer. (If José Saramago bears an uncanny resemblance to Bo Obama, the First Pet, it’s no coincidence: the two dogs are brothers. Anna’s father was an early fundraiser for Barack Obama; José Saramago was a gift from the President.)

Anna takes José Saramago’s paw in her hands and whispers in his ear. He taps the iPad and the web browser opens. José Saramago gives a little yelp.

“It’s entirely conceivable that a dog could learn simple computer functions,” says Dr. Walker Brown, the director of the Center for Canine Cognition, a research facility in Maryland. “Word processing, e-mailing, even surfing the web: for many dogs, the future is already here.”

In Anna’s bedroom, decorated with the trophies and medals common to young achievers, José Saramago is on Facebook, the popular social networking website. He’s helping Anna organize an event to raise money for her greatest passion: sustainable ibex farming.

A member of a generation that seems to have lost interest in the idle pleasures of sleepaway camp, Anna has spent the last three summers working on an ibex farm in the Catskills, just ninety minutes from her Manhattan home. Anna’s parents, Leslie Wilhelm, an editor of style and fashion books, and Walter Gilliam, a partner at a boutique investment firm, love that they can see their daughter often. (Williams, Anna’s last name, is a portmanteau of her parents’ surnames.) How often? “The toll collectors on the New York Thruway are becoming close friends,” cracks Anna’s father, referring to the highway connecting New York City to the Catskills. “We’ve always let Anna pursue her dreams, but we like to be able to visit wherever they may take her,” counters Anna’s mother, who has accompanied her daughter on long trips to Uganda, Bangladesh and the Mississippi Delta.

The Catskills ibex farm is owned by an unlikely pair of friends: Steven Jones, an African-American former police officer from Camden, New Jersey, and Marco Levin, a rabbi from Buenos Aires. Jones is one of the thousands of Americans who have turned to alternate investments after losing his savings in the financial crisis. Rabbi Levin is the founder of the Deuteronomy Diet, which recommends eating only foods available to the Jews of the Old Testament.

Levin believes that the ibex, a wild goat defined as kosher in the Book of Deuteronomy, is one of the healthiest foods in the world. “In Biblical times, men and women regularly lived for hundreds of years,” says Levin. “If we ate as our ancestors did, there’s no reason why modern man cannot do the same.”

Anna Williams first came to Yael Farms (yael is Hebrew for “Nubian ibex”) after her mother read an article by Dr. Walter Andersen, a clinical physician who specializes in adolescent health. Andersen thinks teenagers today are too focused on their minds, often at the expense of their physical well-being. “Their brains are getting plenty of exercise,” Dr. Andersen says. “It’s the rest of their bodies I’m worried about.”

At Yael Farms, Anna gets plenty of exercise. She spends the day herding ibex, drawing water from a well, and moving heavy stones. After a Deuteronomy-friendly dinner of figs, unleavened bread and honey-drizzled ibex, she practices her Mandarin. Like many of the ibex farms sprouting up across the northeastern United States, Yael offers an intensive Chinese-language immersion course.

“We speak Chinese here,” says Jones, the farm’s co-owner. “It’s just smart business.” Foreign policy analysts like Wilbur Jenkins, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, think entrepreneurs like Jones have the right idea. “In China, children are being taught English in utero,” Jenkins says. “American teenagers better start catching up.”

It’s not all manual labor and pinyin at Yael. After three summers in the Catskills, Anna Williams has also become an authority on Borscht Belt comedy. Anna’s interest in 1930s Yiddishkeit led her directly to Rebecca Smythe, a blogger from Brooklyn.

On a once-gritty block in Canarsie, Smythe is opening what she says will be New York’s first coffeehouse inspired by Yiddish musicals. While Anna helps Smythe book acts for the coffee shop, Sal DiPaolo watches with some concern. DiPaolo has lived in Canarsie for all of his 77 years and worries that newcomers are driving up the cost of living in his neighborhood. Sal’s cousin, Anthony, takes a different view.

“Look, it’s New York,” Anthony DiPaolo says. “I welcome the new blood.” DiPaolo has invited many young people, including Anna, to join his bocce club. Bocce, once the exclusive province of Italian men like Sal and Anthony DiPaolo, is becoming popular among a new generation of New Yorkers. Six months ago, Anna started her own bocce club. It’s already one of the most popular extracurricular activities at her school.

Will bringing bocce to the Upper East Side be enough to get Anna Williams into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? She’ll find out next week. Until then, she’s got her hands full: José Saramago just learned how to use Twitter.

David Parker is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Politico and the Huffington Post.

Photo by Thomas Mueller from Flickr.

“Stadiums named after companies are hardly new. But in Dresden, many find a new name resulting from a recent sponsorship deal to be unfortunate. ‘Lucky Gas Stadium,’ critics say, is problematic in light of Germany’s Third Reich history.”

To Britain, where the thrill of glassing has apparently proved insufficient for today’s yobs, leading to a disturbing new form of violence: hennings:

The RSPCA was today searching for two young thugs who filmed themselves throwing a live chicken through a KFC drive-through window — and then put the video online. The film, entitled ‘Chicken Shuts Down KFC’ shows the window of a restaurant in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, where the two men are seen apparently waiting for a car to pull up. As the car approaches, the window opens and the man is seen hurriedly shoving the chicken through it before darting off towards the road, screaming: ‘Chicken!’

The chicken in question apparently experienced a bit of trauma, but should pull through: “Inspector Helen Smith, from the RSPCA, said the bird was not harmed but did suffer some distress…. The RSPCA is now looking for a new home for the hen, which it has named Mrs Sanders.”

Alien Hand Syndrome is apparently a thing: “I’d light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn’t realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on.”

Will some please explain what the phrase “piece of ass” means to the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait? Poor guy seems genuinely puzzled.

“There’s little doubt this treatment has an image problem. Feces, including important bowel flora, is transferred from a volunteer donor — screened to limit possible other infections — into the colon of the infected patient. The treatment can be administered by a colonoscope or an enema, or by the mouth or the nose.”
 — A terrible disease, the Clostridium difficile bug, can cause severe diarrhea, blood poisoning and lead to death, and has proven highly resistant to anti-biotics. But Sydney-based gastroenterologist Thomas Borody has developed an amazingly successful cure. And given the choice, most patients say, “Yes, please, put someone else’s poop inside me.” So this is a very good, important thing. Now excuse me, I will go vomit. (Maybe I should save it? In case that can be used to somehow help someone in need.)

Is President Obama, like his hero Ronald Reagan, coloring his hair? “From these pictures it appears Barack Obama has dyed his greying hair jet black — giving him a new youthful look.” Uh, okay, that’s a pretty rigorous method of analysis.

“Berlusconi has become a figure of fun. He comes across as an old fool at the mercy of these girls and their relatives who use him as a sort of cash machine.”
 — Italian media and communications expert Klaus Davi explains why this Silvio Berlusconi prostitution scandal is worse than other Silvio Berlusconi prostitution scandals: people are laughing at him. And that’s the worst thing that can happen, because, “for most Italians being ‘fesso’ (stupid) is less forgivable than having a roving eye and being unfaithful.” In related news, meet Nichi Vendola, the gay, ex-communist poet who might replace the premier if the Italian left ever gets its act together (which, based on past performance, is unlikely).

Photo by Alessio85, from Flickr.

Proto-Vertical: Blogs

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6. Green (June 4, 2008)

7. Style (July 29, 2008)

8. Chicago (August, 2008)

9. World (December 4, 2008)

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11. New York (June 22, 2009)

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19 .College (February 22, 2010)

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