A Tale of Two Cafés and Distant Errors, Christmas Journal 2 Summary and Analysis

In "A Tale of Two Cafés," Gopnik brooded on what he called the Two-Café Problem, related to the Three-Body Problem of nineteenth century mathematics, which concerned the effects on each other of three planets that all were affected by gravity. Gopnik's challenge was to figure out why the Café de Flore was popular and its neighbor, the equally venerable Les Deux Magots, was scorned by the Parisian fashionable set. Gopnik researched the histories of the two establishments, discovering that the Deux Magots was for years the more fashionable café. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir were a few of the famous people who frequented it.

A friend told Gopnik that the former owner of Les Deux...