The New Yorker, {2006-02-06,2005-09-12}

[fiefoe]

"Code Breaker" / Jim Holt

__ Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
__ When it came to the computer’s memory, for example, the most obvious storage device was one in which the data took the form of vibrations in liquid mercury. But Turing reckoned that gin would be just as effective, and far cheaper.

_________________________________________________________

"Stealing Time" / David Grann  
    Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, sometimes even a touch mad. Ro LeFlore, who stole ninety-seven bases with the Montreal Expos, was a convicted armed robber; Ty Cobb, who was called "psychotic" by his authorized biographer...

 "The Cellular Church" / Malcolm Gladwell
    The small group was an extraordinary vehicle of commitment.

"A Cloud of Dust" / John Updike

__ It combines the author’s saturnine strengths with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy. The novel shares with “Ragtime” a texture of terse episodes..., but has little of the older book’s distancing jazz, its impudent, mocking shuffle of facts;
__ Reading historical fiction, we often itch, our curiosity piqued, to consult a book of straight history, to get to the facts without the fiction. But “The March” stimulates little such itch; it offers an illumination, fitful and flickering, of a historic upheaval that only fiction could provide.

<<