The New Yorker, 2007-07-23

"Letter from Pakistan: Days of Rage" / William Dalrymple
__ Named A.G.H.S., after the initials of the four partners, it was soon dubbed Hags by the male legal establishment.

"The Tycoon" / Nick Paumgarten

• He is a man whose collection of accomplishments, possessions, and associations both obscures and begs the question of what life is for.
• ... his conversational carapace... He is of a genus and a generation for whom most occasions - speeches, dinner parties, deal closings - call for a well-told joke.
• And I said, 'There's a different way of describing that particular process, which is that when you're in a negotiation that is as difficult as this will be you do want to walk a mile in the other man's shoes. That way, when the deal blows up, you're a mile away - and you have his shoes.'
• Zuckerman was amazed that he'd get calls from such prominent Washingtonians as Anthony Lake, the national security adviser, who would assail him with strategic suggestions about how to improve the team.
  

"A Fine Romance" / David Denby

__ slacker-striver couples
__ The characters need to be wealthy in order to exercise their will openly and make their choices. The screwball comedies are less about possessions than about a certain style of freedom in love, a way of vaulting above the dullness and pettymindedness of the sticks.
__ The screwball movies, at their peak, defined certain ideal qualities of insouciance, a fineness of romantic temper in which men and women could be aggressive but not coarse, angry but not rancorous, silly but not shamed, melancholy but not ravaged. It was the temper of American happiness.

"There She Blew" / Caleb Crain

• Ultimately, there is nothing like rowing a little boat up to a sixty-ton mammal that swims, stabbing it, and hoping that it dies a relatively well-mannered death.
• Right whales contained baleen, a fibrous and feathery tissue in their mouths,.. Flexible when heated, baleen, also known as whalebone, kept whatever shape it was cooled into, like plastic.
• Davis, Gallman, and Gleiter surmise that the fashion for wasp waists in the late nineteenth century added about fifteen years to the dying industry's life.
• As it happens, Melville dropped hints from time to time that the making of literature was like whaling. It, too, was a craft that lingered into the industrial age. It, too, expressed by a somewhat violent process the essence that a living creature collected in its head.
  

Denby: Many Americans have so misunderstood the ethos of democracy that they hate being outclassed by anyone.

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