The New Yorker, 2005-04-25

"Invaders" / Ian Frazier

__ Mongol armies sometimes did not destroy churches, mosques, and monasteries. ...  At their empire’s height, they had a fast and efficient postal service, of much greater extent than any the world had seen.
__ Recently, a geneticist at Oxford University... Dr. Tyler-Smith and his colleagues found that an anomalously large number of the Y chromosomes carried a genetic signature indicating descent from a single common ancestor about a thousand years ago. The scientists theorized that the ancestor was Genghis Khan (or, more exactly, an eleventh-century ancestor of Genghis Khan). About eight per cent of all males in the region studied, or sixteen million men, possess this chromosome signature. That’s a half per cent of the world’s entire male population.
__ For the Persian Shiite astronomer Nasir-al-Din Tusi, who had abetted the Mongols ever since they freed him from the Assassins, Hulagu built a costly observatory, which later produced the first scientifically accurate explanation of the rainbow.
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"I Got a Scheme" / Saul Bellow

__ Parisian gutters are flushed every morning by municipal employees who open the hydrants a bit and let water run along the curbs. I seem to remember there were also rolls of burlap that were meant to keep the flow from the middle of the street. Well, there was a touch of sun in the water that strangely cheered me. I suppose a psychiatrist would say that this was some kind of hydrotherapy — the flowing water, freeing me from the caked burden of depression that had formed on my soul. But it wasn’t so much the water flow as the sunny iridescence. Just the sort of thing that makes us loonies cheerful.
__ By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write?
__ Chicago was big on gab in the twenties and thirties, and under the influence of gab you came to feel yourself an insider. Verbal swagger was a limited art.... On a higher level was H. L. Mencken, of The American Mercury.
__ A language might be restrictive or it might be expansive. An excess of corrections caused shrinking.
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Anthony Lane referred to George Clooney as human catnip

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mefi quote, no. 15

"Don't think of it as supporting their economy. Think of it as burning their crops."
--Kinky (speaking to Bill Clinton!) on Cuban cigars
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 12:19 PM PST on June 30
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Yes.

Plus I lost The Game.
posted by bigbigdog at 8:58 PM PST on July 3
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We weren't discussing "hew", kahboom.
posted by kenko at 2:26 PM PST on July 7

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