The New Yorker, 2006-01-23,30 b

[fiefoe]

"The Mission" / David Levering Lewis

__ J. Edgar Hoover looms unforgettably in these pages... Worse, he kept intelligence of assassination plots from King and barred F.B.I. agents from providing covert protection.
__ To some, the L.B.J.-M.L.K. relationship may have resembled that of Henry II and Thomas à Becket.

"The Pursuit of Happiness" / Tad Friendly
It was the worst case of deja vu. I thought I'd read a very similar story about LA car chase via mefi, but that just pointed to the same thing. Finally google took pity on me.

• 95 million Americans watched the pursuit on television, and Domino's Pizza set a delivery record.
• "Third, our idiots are highly mobile."
• The classic pursuits are diverse in their astonishments... There was the guy who stole a 7 UP truck and started running red lights in the Valley, smashing into cars and rounding corners with cases of soda flying out and geysering across the road;...(there was 'a motorcyclist serpentined around six vigilante pedestrians who were trying to stop him on Ventura Boulevard, finally broke free, and then T-boned a Mercedes at the next intersection.')
• And if you have eluded your pursuers with masterly driving for a goodly period you must then pull into a fast-food joint to be overpowered.
• A recent chase on KCAL was analyzed as follows: "Spike strip, got it!... Here it comes, here it comes, once again, spinning the car around! Oooh! Lookathat!"
• "How's your adrenaline?"... "Fine" "Hold your hand like this," he said, spreading his fingers horizontally. I did, and everyone laughed - my fingers were jumping like baitfish.
• "We looked at hitting cars with a laser to kill the engine,.. but the military were the only ones who had the technology, and it was a little more lethal than we needed."

__ doxology; an uncomfortable class valence; a vision of a metropolis knit together by speed and spectacle;

<<