The New Yorker, 2007-11-19

[fiefoe]

"On Campus: Awesome Ron" / Ben McGrath
__ “It gets quite confusing,” Gordon said. “On a date that’s meant to be anti the guy who’s anti-Parliament, the idea here is to be giving money to someone who’s anti-Parliament.”

"Small and Thin" / Stephen S. Hall
__ ... the "thrifty phenotype." The idea was that the fetus set its metabolic thermostat during critical periods of gestation. If the setting was "thrifty," because of less than optimal fetal nutrition, the individual would be metabolically and physiologically ill suited to adapt to the nutritional prosperity of postnatal life in most developed countries.

"Inside the Surge" / Jon Lee Anderson
__ the Mother of All Battles Mosque
__ “They hate the daily shit, like all soldiers do,” an officer told me. “But they love not getting shot at or blown up by I.E.D.s every day”—which, until midsummer, was how it had been in Ghazaliya. “It’s like going from cocaine to weed,” he said.

"The Player Kings" / Claudia Roth Pierpont

• (Olivier played) the minor role of ancient Justice Shallow.. as a fixated beekeeper... upstaging Richardson, in the larger role of Falstaff, by continually swatting at imaginary bees.
• The whole extraordinarily flowing film ("Othello") was painstakingly pieced together from shots made years and countries apart. "Roderigo kicks Cassio in Massaga," Welles enjoyed explaining, "and gets punched back in Orgete, a thousand miles away."
• He seems merely to have photographed a world miraculously found. .. "It mustn't seem perfectly real," he warned. "It doesn't mean anything unless it makes poetry possible."
  

Dan Chiasson: Strand's childhood reads like a flip book of potential identities: it was spent in Halifax, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico.

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