The New Yorker, 2006-11-20

[fiefoe]

"Talking Turkey" / Bill Buford

• foxes ("no creature more intense, more deliberate, or more uncompromising")
• To call something Turkish meant just that: a very far-away exotic thing.
  
• .. more reptile than fowl, with what looks like a hard shellacked black coat, a long unmodern neck, and an ugly pockmarked head. (A pediatrician of my acquaintance had to resort to the label of a famous bourbon to confirm the nature of the beast he'd discovered one day near his home.)
• (He falls asleep, dreaming of Joseph Campbell, and misses the approach of a hawk, which swoops down and picks up a two-week-old poult, and, startled that its mother has a mustache, drops it, but not before it dies.)
  
• ... so whatever Hutto ate the turkey believed he was entitled to eat as well: Hutto's coffee, his turkey sandwich, his glass of wine. ("There would be a small deposit of gray sand in the bottom from Turkey Boy's gritty mouth.)
  

"Homer In India" / William Dalrymple

• In contrast, when the tsunami struck at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies: the catastrophic calamities and floods that fill the Mahabharata and the Hindu tradition in general. As Doniger puts it, "The myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastrophe, to make a kind of sense by analogy."
  
• The bhopas like to say that the phad of Dev Narayan is so full of bravery that when you tell the tale the grass gets burned around it.
• ..once the phad was complete and the eyes of the hero were painted in..
  

"Downfall" / Peter J. Boyer

__ The stunning German victory was produced by a battlefield innovation, blitzkrieg, that married two relatively new technologies - radio and the internal-combustion engine - to facilitate a tactic of rapid, coordinated movement.
__ "It went all over the building that Andy was back. It was like Deng Xiaoping's return."

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