The New Yorker, 2006-02-13&20, a

[fiefoe]

Postscript (Wendy Wasserstein) / Paul Rudnick

"Little Wing" / Susan Orlean

• This is both the marvellous and the problematical thing about racing pigeons: they have a fixed, profound, and nearly incontrovertible sense of home. Americans move, on average, every five years; pigeons almost never move. This gives the hobby of raising homing pigeons a curious permanence, a fixedness in space.
• There is pigeon feed on the market that contains magnetic particles, and is touted to help navigation.
• As soon as Matt opened their cages, the pigeons poured out like water, and then whooshed into the sky and disappeared into the morning.
• When we got back to Matt’s house and walked into his yard, I could see all of his birds lined up on the roof of their coop, burbling and cooing, shuffling and bowing, as if they were performing the finale of a magic trick.
• the odd, almost noiseless sound of the birds, a sort of cadenced vibration, like an unplugged electric guitar being strummed.
  

"Hutong Karma" / Peter Hessler

• The rice man's refrain is higher-pitched; the vinegar dealer occupies the lower registers. The knife sharpener provides percussion - a steady click-clack of metal plates. The sounds are soothing, a reminder that even if I never left my doorway again life would be sustainable, albeit imbalanced... There would be no shortage of coal. Occasionally, I could eat candied crab apple.
• At the exercise stations, people can spin giant wheels with their hands, push big levers that offer no resistance, and swing on pendulums like children at a park.
• The government rebuilt the public toilet at the head of Ju'er Hutong. The change was so dramatic that it was as if a shaft of light had descended directly from Mt. Olympus to the alleyway, leaving a magnificent structure in its wake.
• He chose a product line in deference to his brother's disability. Fruit and vegetables are too heavy, he reasoned, and a clothes merchant needs two arms to measure and fold goods. Cigarettes are light, so that's what the Wang brothers stocked.
• She said. "How much is your rent?" <> This being China, I told her.
• The hutong essence had more to do with spirit than with structure, and this spirit often showed strongest when the neighborhood encountered some modern element: an Olympic toiliet, a McDonald's franchise. Pragmatism and resourcefulness were deeply ingrained in residents like Good Old Wang, whose environment had always been fluid. The fundamental character of hutong life helped prepare for its destruction.

"Serial Monogamy" / Nora Ephron

__ That was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisee, which was followed by the three M's - mesclun, mache, and microgreens - and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce.
__ Dinner was served. Pork chops, grits, collard greens, and a dish of tiny baked crab apples.

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