The New Yorker, 2009-08-31

"The Rubber Room" / Steven Brill
__ This means that Mohammed’s case is not likely to be decided before December, a year after it began. That is about fifty per cent more time, from start to finish, than the O.J. trial took.

"Shouts & Murmurs: For Immediate Release" / Paul Simms

"Perfect Match" / Burkhard Bilger
__ Mike was born right-handed, Bob left-handed... "The whole thing, just out of the chutes, had utopia written all over it."
__ (The International Tennis Federation's) science and technical department, in London, looks like a Victorian inventor's lab, full of strange gizmos and exploding devices. Tennis balls are shot out of bazookas...

"Useless Beauty" / Nick Paumgarten

• Still, she recognized that the aesthetic enjoyment of dereliction was a recondite and ultimately unsustainable pursuit.
• Maira Kalman... remarked, "This should be the island of a thousand hammocks."
• There is something decadent about the formal curation of rust and the fetishizing of decay. The movement brings to mind the landed gentry's enthusiasm, in England two centuries ago, for construction phony Roman or Green ruins, or "follies", on their estates.

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