The New Yorker, 2006-11-13

[fiefoe]

"Bedfellows Dept: The Fat Lobby" / Lauren Collins

__ The rule, when it comes to battling prohibitions, seems to be the badder the thing, the better the lobby. Of New York City’s many bans—against ferrets, small planes, cell phones in schools, smoking in bars, beekeeping, lead paint—the one proposed, this month, against trans fats is neither the most nor the least contentious. This situation presents some difficulty, at least in terms of political mobilization. In the absence of any standing organization pledged to uphold the interests of nacho-munchers and shortcake fiends, cholesterol defenders have been forced to proceed ad hoc.

"In the Academy: Dr. Garbage" / Ben Mcgrath
__ Nationally, fatality rates for sanitation workers, owing to the risks associated with loading trucks in the midst of moving traffic, are roughly three times those for firemen and policemen.

"Holy Rollers" / Ben McGrath
__ The hierarchy of urban piety is ever delicate. Still another Villager, a biking enthusiast, railed against the unctuousness of the anti-bike pedestrians.

"Strangers In Paradise" / Janet Malcolm

• Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. .. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred.
• The biographer .. must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to the full humanity of anyone else.
• The epistolary art is the art of favorable self-representation; (Toklas's) forays into what Henry James called the "twaddle of graciousness" are especially masterly.
  

"The Megacity" / George Packer

__ As a picture of the urban future, Lagos is fascinating only if you’re able to leave it. After just a few days in the city’s slums, it is hard to maintain Koolhaas’s intellectual excitement... It would be preferable to have some respite from buying and selling, some separation between private and public life. It would be preferable not to have five-hour “go-slows”—traffic jams—that force many workers to get up well before dawn and spend almost no waking hours at home. And it would be preferable not to have an economy in which millions of people have to invent marginal forms of employment because there are so few jobs.
__ The patronage system... amounts to a predatory system of obligation, set down in no laws, enforced by implied threat.
__ In Lagos, the spirit of individualism overwhelms the idea of solidarity.

"Village Scribe: Leonard Woolf, Bloomsbury’s older brother" / Rachel Cohen

__ The group was at its most involuted: Strachey and Keynes were both sleeping with Duncan Grant, who had not yet started sleeping with Vanessa Bell, who had two children and was painting seriously and sleeping with Roger Fry.

David Denby: the not excessively demanding standards of middle-aged renovation fantasies

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