In the daytime, Pachner recently said, he could only distinguish between dark shadows and bright light, white and dark, while in the evenings he couldn’t sleep, and “the whole motion picture of my life passes unwittingly, unwantingly—I don’t desire it—but with great vividness and authenticity, and like a tremendous newsreel.”

…One day, according to Galina Berenshteyn, her husband came to her and said, “I would like to put the Statue of Liberty in the backyard.” “I said, ‘This is a joke,’ ” Galina recalled, “I couldn’t believe that this is true!” Berenshteyn scoured the Internet and tracked down a seven-and-a-half-foot-high fiberglass model of the Statue of Liberty at a store in South Hampton.

“He’s a beast,” said Igor “Mamute” Caetano, a professional mixed-martial arts fighter and black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) who is head instructor of a rival Toronto gym. “Everybody that faces him just gets killed.”

He hopes to get up to 225 pounds, which, judging by his elephantine diet and all the weights he lifts, is a target he should meet with ease. Rocco eats a devastating amount of food. His mornings begin at 8 o’clock, at which time he heads downstairs to the Goulds’ kitchen and consumes six Eggo waffles. “Or I have, like, two bowls of Lucky Charms,” he explained to me. “And I might have an apple.”

I’m drinking a scotch in the VIP section of the Garden of the Gods, waiting for the God of Gods, Seth Rogen. Any minute now, he should be walking past 50-foot-high Corinthian columns flanked by statues of Julius Caesar mounted on war horses and into the private area between the Neptune Pool and Temple Pool, in which I’m standing, comfortably, beside a heat lamp…I’m not supposed to be in the VIP area. I snuck in here a few minutes ago by hopping the rope when nobody was looking.

…What Heschel’s players are learning from their new coaches goes beyond basketball. “I think they’re learning respect for different kinds of people in the world,” Dortch said. “That there’s something to learn from everyone.”

Unlike in boxing or martial arts, nothing is off limits. “Do whatever you want,” Nakash told me. “In this room if someone attacks you, use the chair. Break the chair on his head.” The three of us sat down on rusty folding chairs in a white, windowless room. “If someone attacks you with a knife, with an ax, with a baseball bat, or somebody wants to stab you,” Nakash said, “it’s a problem.”

A beautiful marble elevator playing classical music brought them up to their spacious suite on the 24th floor. On a wide ledge separating the bedroom area from a sunken living room were dozens of Holocaust Survivor Band T-shirts, some of them reading “NEVER, NEVER, NEVER QUIT.”

Once, an Old-City Christian archaeologist named Eugenio Alliata, who dons a flowing brown robe in the style of a Franciscan monk, told a visitor to his museum, “Issa is the most famous dweller in all the Christian Quarter. His name is on every door and every wall.”

Unlike on American Idol, the judges had all sorts of trouble criticizing contestants. Rosenfeld said that during one elimination round, the judges “wanted to crawl under the table” to avoid hurting singers’ feelings. One judge, Yeedle Werdyger—a popular Jewish singer who is the son of the Orthodox music icon Mordechai Ben-David—was so distraught that he cried and had to be consoled by the other judges.

On this night, some of the male spectators appeared spacey or disinterested, but most were engaged, bobbing heads and tapping shoes to the pop, techno, reggae, hip-hop, and funky beats. At one point, six men shot up from their seats, locked hands, and spun Hora-style around a makeshift dance floor…The band performed at a wedding in Park Slope, and at Columbia University’s Chabad House. It also played on top of a float that rolled around Crown Heights during Purim.