The New Yorker, 2008-{08-25,06-9&16}

"Comment: Boundary Issues" / David Remnick
__ Part of the “naïve fable” was that the collapse of the Soviet Union would peaceably defy historical precedent. Empires, blinded by hauteur and ambition, don’t often stoop to understand the complexities of their human and territorial acquisitions, and care even less about the disfigurements and time bombs they eventually leave behind.
__ Promises of a voluntary and effective commonwealth of liberated nations soon became a rueful memory.

"Letter from Beijing: The Only Games in Town" /  Anthony Lane
__ Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.
__ (On water polo: )The rules and infringements of this ancient sport are of a solemn complexity, but all are founded on the fundamental desire of one person to treat another as a tea bag.

"A Greenwich of the Mind" / Nick Paumgarten
__ In the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, it is illegal for a real-estate agent to post a “For Sale” sign in front of a house or a tract of land.
__ Generally, people are almost as protective of their property values as they are of their children, and will be as doting in their appraisals of both.

"The Forbidden World" / Joan Acocella    {布鲁诺！}
__ Ancient orators had used artificial memory systems, mentally attaching their ideas onto statues, or objects in the rooms of a building, so that later, in their minds, they could revisit those statues and rooms, retrieve their ideas, and thus give seven-hour speeches without note cards.

Paul Goldberger: Museums require mostly solid, windowless walls.

Nancy Franklin: In fact, during one night of the women’s gymnastics competition, the commentator Al Trautwig went a little too far in the other direction, reflecting on how fortunate it was that a member of the Chinese team who, he said, had two years earlier begged her parents to let her quit the sport and come home hadn’t been allowed to do so.

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"The Pictures: Digging" / Mike Peel
Nels Nelson, 1875-1964: "When beset by outlaws in Mongolia, he brandished his glass eye at the brigands, who quickly fled."

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