The New Yorker, 2006-07-24

[fiefoe]

"Rules of the Game: Can We Forgive Him?" / Adam Gopnik
__ Just as all architects who are any good are megalomaniacs, all athletes at this level are fuelled by anger when they play;

"The Preeclampsia Puzzle" / Jerome Groopman
__ fetal cells called trophoblasts invade the inner lining of the mother's uterus, where they behave much like "an alien parasite," .. burrow deep into the uterus, and... remodel the mother's arteries. The vessels around the placenta become wide, with thin walls - and capable of carrying a hundred times more blood.

"The Tenth Planet" / Alec Wilkinson
__ In general, the farther away the thing an astronomer studies, the more respect he or she receives.
__ Names of pets are unwelcome. ... Asteroids near Jupiter called Trojan asteroids must be named for heroes of the Trojan War.

"The Storm of Style" / Alex Ross
__ Mozart inhabits a middle world where beauty surges in and ebbs away, where everything is contingent and nothing pure, where, as Henry James's Madame Merle says, an envelope of circumstance encloses every human life.

"Golden Girl"/ Peter Schjeldahl
__ Klimt was working in the Indian summer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the period of Robert Musil’'s “"The Man Without Qualities”" - —an efflorescence, soon to be ruined, of pell-mell modernization, careering idealism, incendiary genius (Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein), and, among the rich and cultivated, zealous decadence. It’s all there in “Adele”: the painting is exquisite and brazen, compelling and brittle, too self-conscious to be experienced as altogether beautiful but transcendent in its cunning way.

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