The New Yorker, 2008-04-28

"Hoopla Dept.: Pope-A-Palooza" / Lizzie Widdicombe
__ Wangro had to deal with one last thing: organizing a small Seder, which would be held at sunset in the bishops’ tent, after the papal entourage had left.

"Crazy English" / Evan Osnos
__ One of its few unifying beliefs.. is the power of English.
__ Li's cosmology ties the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power.
__ On the final night, they walked on a bed of hot coals. Between classes, the campus was scattered with lone learners, muttering like rabbinical students, Li's books pressed to their faces, their lips racing.

"The Last Verse" / Burkhard Bilger
__ The sound was both clear and amiably cluttered.
__ Depending on the pattern, he can fit his turntable with any of two dozen diamond needles, specially carved to ride at different heights within the groove.

"Arms and the Man" / Daniel Mendelsohn

• his notorious tendency to digress for the sake of the most abstruse detail (“And so the Athenians were the first of the Hellenes to make statues of Hermes with an erect phallus”),
• (“In the shade” is the motto of an armored division in the present-day Greek Army.)
• In Herodotus’ own time, it’s worth remembering, the idea of “beautiful prose” would have been a revolutionary one: the ancient Greeks considered prose so debased in comparison to verse that they didn’t even have a word for it until decades after the historian wrote, when they started referring to it simply as psilos logos, “naked language,” or pedzos logos, “walking language” (as opposed to the dancing, or even airborne, language of poetry).
  

Cartoon: one salmon to another droopy lipped one - "Well, you have three hundred miles and two more waterfalls to get in the mood."

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