The New Yorker, 2006-10-02, 2008-06-23

"Dept. of Gridlock: Wonk Week" / Ben McGrath
__ “I don’t know that there’ll ever be another asbestos,” the lawyer said, assessing the future in his own resigned way.

"TV Dinners" / Bill Buford
__ Child had to cope with electric shocks ("we could never get that mike grounded"),

“The Path of Stones” / Burkhard Bilger

• The Black Prince's Ruby in the British Imperial State Crown is really a spinel.
• Heat treatment is the alchemy of the gem world... Until the nineteen-sixties, heat treatment was a low-tech affair that hadn't change much since Pliny the Elder referred to it in his "History of the World".
• By any normal standard, the sapphires we'd seen were extraordinarily select... They represented an infinitesimal percentage of the earth's crust- the one-in-a-trillion chance that a rock might be beautiful - yet they still weren't good enough... It was a strange, contradictory sort of perfectionism.
• "If you ask around this room, the Malagasy men will all tell you they were circumcised between the ages of two and five and their father ate the foreskin with banana."

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"On the Podium: The Way They Move" / Lizzie Widdicombe
__ "She was what we call very Embodied."

"Hello, Hal" / John Seabook
__ That's one reason actors only approximate anger; the real thing can damage the voice.

"First Impressions" / Judith Thurman
__ For the conventions of cave paintings to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been "Deeply satisfying" - and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

James Woods: Recited memories are what a marriage is.

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