The New Yorker, 2005-07-11&18

[fiefoe]

"Sports Dept: Team For Sale" / Hendrik Hertzberg
    (Soros) is a “convicted felon”—but in France, a detail that has caused cognitive dissonance at places like Fox News.

"The Turtles" / Jianying Zha

• Many latter-day "capitalists" were born, in a process that Marx-conscious Chinese scholars have called "primitive accumulation."
• "You say, 'I'm pure'? Then no business for you."
• The title read like a manifesto - "Break through brambles and thorns, to the future we strive together" - and the prose continued in the same exalted language. "It got me so excited!" she recalled. {Would that I could be.}
• "In this day and age," Pan said, "only a real person, a controversial person, can attract others' attention. Only then will people be concerned about you."  {Would that be comfort to Zadane?}
• "I'm not one who can fish in murky water. Pan is totally comfortable with murkiness. That's his normal state. And I've learned to tolerate it."
  

"The Candy Man" / Margaret Talbot

• The tone is conversational, confiding, and funny, with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation points and phrases written entirely in capital letters. It’s as if the sentences came embedded with their own stage directions.
• When his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a severe stroke at the age of thirty-nine...
• Adult readers, meanwhile, are given a renewed sense of children’s separateness—and, sometimes, their rage. Dahl’s attunement to the aggressive labors of civilizing a child is no longer fashionable;
• what G. K. Chesterton... said that fairy tales did: inspire in children a sense that life “is not only a pleasure but an eccentric privilege.”
  

"Two Views" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ A work of art, Zola said, is “a corner of the creation seen through a temperament.”
__ The difficulty of Cézanne is the spiritual cornerstone of the Museum of Modern Art.
__ As if slipped past a nodding doorkeeper, Pissarro’s earnestly ingratiating pictures jangle the museum’s policy of fiercely screened modernness.

Jasper Johns, "White Flag" (1955)
Raphael, "The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani')"
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