The New Yorker, 2005-11-28

[fiefoe]

H. G. Wells: "The World Set Free"
    Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it;

"Land of the Diesel Bear" / John McPhee

• In the Berkshires, seventeen miles from the New York state line, he pointed out a brown-and-white westbound sign that said "Next Highest Elevation on I-90 in Oacoma, South Dakota." .. Massachusetts might prefer not to know that Oacoma is a Missouri River town accessible from the ocean in a yacht.
• After the interstate's oceanic sameness, the silver tanker in those suburban streets was something like an anadromous fish coming out of the sea and going up a river, suddenly having to pick its way through narrow channels past bridge piers and over ledges up rapids past erratic boulders.
• WD means water displacement. WD-40 was first brewed for the military, in the nineteen-fifties, and the brew came up right on the fortieth try.
• You have not heard the sound of creature comfort until you have heard hundreds of huddled trucks idling through the night.

Louis Menand: The East German secret police, the Stasi, was, basically, the Gestapo.

Sasha Frere-Jones: (Blur) was routinely mocked as a group of posh softies—“students,” in the country’s class-conscious vernacular of derision

Nancy Franklin: There's always room for mixed feelings.

Athony Lane: the slightly tired sadism that is creeping into the cracks of the Potter franchise

Grand Guignol, walleye, rutilant, cordillera

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