The New Yorker, 2006-10-30

[fiefoe]

"Dept. of Demographics: Worst Nightmares" / Michael Schulman
__ People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia)

"My First Day in Hell" / Jack Handey
__ You get tired of trying to explain that you’ve already been branded, or that something that big won’t fit in your ear, even with a hammer. I wandered off. I needed some me time.

"Snook" / Ian Frazier
__ The snook is an elegantly constructed fish. It's narrow, but not too - not snaky like a pike or a barracuda... The snook does not have the pointy teeth that makes similar predatory fish look forbidding and comical, the implication being that it hunts so well it doesn't need them.
__ On his face I saw the joyful ignition of angling triumph.

"The Revoluntionist" / Keith Gessen
__ When Ogarev’s first marriage began to fall apart—his wife cheated on him with every literary journalist in Moscow—all their friends reread Goethe, and George Sand, and talked about the morality of matrimony.
__ The so-called Decembrists were crushed, and the leaders—the flower of the educated nobility, friends of Pushkin and readers of Voltaire—were hanged.
__ Herzen: “We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new truth, we abolish an old lie. Contemporary man only builds the bridge; another, unknown man of the future will walk across it. You perhaps will see it. I beg of you: Do not remain on this shore.”

'Retail politics matters.'

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