The New Yorker, 2006-05-15

[fiefoe]

"Title IX Babies" / David Owen
__ His feel was so exquisitely sensitive, he says, that he could tell the difference in spin between a ball hit with a racquet on which the logo had been stencilled in red paint and one hit with a racquet on which the logo had been stencilled in black, because the pigments had different coefficients of friction.

"Me Media" / John Cassidy
__ "At Harvard, there's a group called Not a Corporate Whore, but a lot of those people are also in the Apple group."

"Paradise Sold" /Steven Shapin
__ Decisions about how we want our food produced and delivered are decisions about what counts as social virtue.
__ Émile Durkheim’s “The Division of Labor in Society,” drew a distinction between what he called mechanical and organic solidarity... Mechanical solidarity, in Durkheim’s scheme, was largely a premodern form. By contrast, organic solidarity flowed from the division of labor... And so, by semantic inversion, champions of organic farming actually seek virtue not in organic but in mechanical solidarity.

"Decoration Myths" / Peter Schjeldahl  {We were there!}

• An approving critic, on this occasion, is tasked with discovering significant questions to which Woodman’s art is the right answer. How can something be important that seems, at first blush, so capricious?
• Since decoration is art that is meant not to be looked at directly but to be taken in peripherally, Woodman’s work may seem overqualified, in its peremptory splendors. But, in effect, the work dreams of a world in which beautiful invention is to be expected, as an aesthetic civil right.
• in her home town of Newton, Massachusetts,
• What we identify as fine art functions at a middle distance, where eyesight is most efficient. Ceramics claim space within arm’s reach, where vision blends with touch.
  

"Save Us" / Anthony Lane
__ I would defend such restlessness, which reaches back, through the jet-set kitsch of the Bond pictures, through Hitchcock (who was never embarrassed by a major tourist site, all the way to "Morocco" and "Shanghai Express".
__ their monolithic charms

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