The New Yorker, 2005-12-19

[fiefoe]

"Becoming Mary Poppins" / Catlin Flannagan
    (P. L. Travers) wrote, “... Why was Mary Poppins, already beloved for what she was—plain, vain and incorruptible—transmogrified into a soubrette?”

'Field Studies: John Q. Gotham' / Lauren Collins
    O’Keefe disembarked at Eighty-sixth Street, where a couple waiting for a bus were counted out, on the basis of marriage, but weighed in, anyway, on what New Yorkers have in common. “Al Wilson’s cousin, remember, dear, went to a very fine college in California, went on to medical school, and she came to visit—this was twenty, twenty-five years ago—and said that we really are much more hip here.”

"Shouts & Murmurs: Chapters 38:1-42:17" / Ian Frazier
    “Yes, and consider even this example: When my servant David Ortiz, last year or the year before, in an important situation, entreated me in his heart for a hanging curveball, and I heard him, and ordained a hanging curveball to be thrown, and he smote it hip and thigh, and ended up at second, and stood there in the lights pointing straight up to the firmament where I in fact was, David Ortiz praising me before all the assembly and those at home, did you then understand the vastness of my power, or can you unfold for me the art of causing hanging curveballs in important situations which I employed there?

David Denby on 'King Kong': 'His exuberance spills over into senselessness.'

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