The New Yorker, 2006-05-01

"Not in Kansas: The Land of Turkmenbashi" / David Remnick
    In the capital, Ashgabat, there is, atop the Arch of Neutrality, a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot gold statue of Turkmenbashi that, like George Hamilton, automatically rotates to face the sun.

"Vessels" / Daniel Raeburn
    I sifted the ash through a sieve into a mixing bowl. I rolled a sheet of paper into a cone, lodged the funnel into the pot's aperture, and poured in the fine ash. It hissed like sand from a hour-glass. I took the larger, unsifted bits of Irene from the sieve and dropped them into the eye one piece at a time.
{Bill Buford's "Carnal Knowledge" made a surprisingly good lead for this article.}

"Kiss City" / Ben McGrath
    A study in mannered deliberation, Cutler assumed a eries of poses, not unlike a bodybuilder's: the Astronomer (hands thrust toward the ceiling, head tilted up and to the left, staring into the light); the Atlas (bending and lifting and imaginary boulder several times in succession); the Receiver...; the Commander...; the Puzzler...; and my favorite, the Backward Stumbling Buddha ( reverse shuffle steps into an increasingly wide stance, head down, palms together).

"Birth of a Nation?" / Ian Parker

__ the U.N. formed a committee whose name, when spoken by anyone familiar with it, is usually preceded by a theatrical gulp of breath: the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
__ In Tokelau, aluminum boats are guided at high speeds, through barely submerged coral beds, by languid young men who are as coolly removed from the act of driving as are Italian teen-agers on Vespas.

"The Theatre: The History Boys & The Threepenny Opera" / John Lahr

__ The Oxbridge system emphasizes presentation, rather than penetration, the “free-floating state of cleverness,” as one British journalist put it. The Socratic dialogue is replaced with the technique of paradox, and eloquence trumps relevance.
__ "Pirate Jenny" led Dylan to invent his own narrative folk style.

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