The New Yorker, 2006-09-11

[fiefoe]

"Reflections: Old Country" / Roger Angell

Those of us in our eighties or late seventies can still remember when this was called a young country (it was said all the time in school) and, if we lived in New York, retain the vision of earlier iconic towers—the Empire State, the Chanin Building, the George Washington Bridge—going up, week by week, to prove the point.  <...> Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,, had in his long lifetime shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and also our new incumbent, John F. Kennedy. How young we were, after all! None of us, no one in the world, holds such a notion today. Our United States feels as old as Tyre. <...> Also anxious and bloodied; also short of sleep... Boys and girls born that spring and summer are entering kindergarten this year... We worry about them, as elders do, but what we know about them that they don’t is that they are the older generation.

"The Forgotten War" / Jeffrey Goldberg
__ "If I die, this is the photo that will appear on the martyr posters in Gaza." All of his schoolmates have a "martyr photo," he said, "so when we get killed we'll have the best posters."

"The Moderate Martyr" / George Packer
__ Whenever secular intellectuals in Muslim countries try to bypass the question of Sharia, Naim said, "they leave the high moral ground to the fundamentalists, and they lose."
__ Actors simulated "weddings" between martyrs and heavenly virgins on state television.

"Surveillance Society" / Caleb Crain

• The movement already had fifty volunteers, and it aspired to have five thousand, ready to study such aspects of contemporary life as: ... Shouts and gestures of motorists. The aspidistra cult...
• Peggy Guggenheim, one of his lovers, claimed that he “looked like Donald Duck”—she dumped him and took up with Samuel Beckett—but in a 1944 photograph that Lee Miller shot for Vogue Jennings appears glamorous and confident.
  
• In a group, people drink faster than alone, and the rhythm of the drinking is so deeply felt that they nearly always finish their rounds together, even if they’re blind.
• In 1945, (Harrison) parachuted into Borneo, where he led a guerrilla force of native tribesmen, who were thrilled to resume head-hunting, which the British had only recently forbidden.
  

"Old and New" / Peter Schjeldahl
__ (The epoch called “contemporary” grows longer year by year, as the era that minimalism instituted bids to be eternal.) Since then, a great deal of ambitious art has espoused, or, at least, countenanced boredom—the forced consciousness of passing time.
__ It may be in the nature of hybrid art forms, like their botanical kin, to prove as sterile as they may be extraordinary.

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