The New Yorker, 2005-12-05

[fiefoe]

"Beijing Postcard: Poppy, Shopping" / Peter Hessler
__ One section of wall was dedicated entirely to photographs of Tarja Halonen, the President of Finland.

"Visiting Dignitaries: Gibbons" / Nick Paumgarten
__ his beard, a double-barrelled two-footer that, along with a pair of Ray-Bans and an African cap that resembles a full head of stubby dreadlocks, leaves little room for evidence of a face.

"Texture Dept: Waling" / Ben McGrath
__ velvet, a fustian rival.
__ one story has the term originating in seventeenth-century France (corde du roi: the king’s cloth)
__ Rohan announced that the next meeting would be held on January 11th, which is the date that second-most resembles corduroy.

"Man of Letters" / Alec Wilkinson

• Then he blew out the candle and heldthe punch in the smoke. When it was blackened, he moistened some paper by breathingon it and pressed the punch gently into it. The image was called a smoke proof.
• Designing type involves a kind of stagecraft - "organized cheating," Frere-Jones calls it - so that the eye will accept as symmetrical froms that are actually imperfect.
  
• "When you realize that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beatuy as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else."
• Printers kept their letters in cases arranged before them on a table... Capital letters were kept in the upper case, and small letters in the lower case.
  
• Dickens used a lot of voiwels. Lord Mccaulay used mainly consonants.
  

"Darwin in the Dock" / Mararet Talbot
__ "I like of feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband. As the old adage goes, I know what to do, but I just can't make it exciting."

"Everybody's An Expert" / Louis Menand

__ Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable.
__ And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely... The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur.
__ They were seduced by the detail.

"Bleak House" / John Lahr
__ Lucy’s brightness, however, is also a sort of shadow play; it throws oblique but harrowing light on the offstage desolation she endures. A child’s “liveliness and color,” the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott wrote, is often a response to his or her mother’s dark depression, and Haidle’s playful and punishing play subtly traps this sleight of mind.

David Denby (on "Syriana"):
__ His specialty, however, is the décor and style of power—a joshing, slightly menacing bonhomie, with cradled snifters of brandy and mutual flatteries, and then a sudden shift from charm to contemptuous bullying.

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