The New Yorker, 2008-04-21

"Tigerland" / Caroline Alexander

• The permit, issued by the Government of West Bengal, Forest Department, was important: among other things, it insured that his family would be recompensed in the event that he was taken by a tiger.
• The mangroves shimmered in the low morning light—literally shimmered, as the leaves of some species are covered with a glossy protective wax, which is secreted, along with excess salt, as one of their strategic adaptations to the saline water.
• “Tiger had blood coming out of his nose,” Dr. Sanyal said, majestically. “But he did not say a thing. He kept on swimming. As soon as he got to the other side, he put one paw on the ground, and he turned with the second paw and came up under the crocodile’s belly, and flipped him”—eighteen hundred pounds of estuarine crocodile, which the tiger then ripped open. There was a pause while we savored this tale of strategy and courage. Dr. Sanyal had regained his own gentle manner. “And this is why we love Tiger,” he said.
• Mondol ran after them for some thirty or forty feet and then stopped. “Such a big animal, but there was not a branch broken,” he said,

"Vengeance is Ours" / Jared Diamond
__ They carry blunt-tipped arrows for warning unshootable close relatives as well as sharp ones for firing at shootable enemies.

"The Way of the Puffin" / Jonathan Franzen

• It was as if the gods of world history had asked, "Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?" and this place had raised its hand and said, "Yeah!" {Sigh.}
• He'd (as a air-traffic controller in Shanghai) even had to argue with passengers who called him on their cell phones.
• Carrying a tripod-mounted camera like a small cross he bore for nature, Shrike...
• China... in its headlong pursuit of money, with fabulous millionaires and a vast underclass and a dismantled social safety net, and with a central government obsessed with security and skilled at exploiting nationalism to quiet its critics, and with economic and environmental regulations entrusted to incestuous consortia of businesses and local governments, had already been striking me as the most Republican place I'd ever been.
• I was pierced again by the feeling I'd had on my first night in Shanghai. But what I'd wanted to describe then as advancedness was, I decided now, more like simple lateness: the sadness of modernity, the period of prolonged unsettling illumination before nightall.

"Up and then Down" / Nick Paumgarten
__ a vertical-transportation-industry professional
__ A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet. A hoist rope any longer is too heavy to be practical; at thirty-two hundred feet, it will snap, like a stream of spit in a stairwell.
__ (The Beijing terminal) project was conceived, designed, constructed, and opened in four years, whereas the Heathrow terminal, from conception to completion, took twenty years.

George Lois and Esquire

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