The New Yorker, 2012-01-02 / 2009-08-03 +

2012-01-02

On Velaquez's Pope Innocent X: "the cleverest, most untrusting eyes that were ever painted"
Margaret Talbot: "Portlandia" is an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.
Ben McGrath ("The Jersey Game"): One opposing coach chose to pull his ten-year-olds off the field rather than submit them to minor car crashes at such an early age.

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2009-08-03

Nichoson Baker: the potent pheromoal funk of pulp and glue

"Travels in Siberia - I" / Ian Frazier

• In Siberia there are eight (time zones). . Across the middle of Siberia, west to east for forty-six hundred miles, runs the Russian taiga, the largest forest in the world.
• Only on the sea can you travel as far and still be apparently the same place.
• He also mentioned a special kind of bird whose nests were so soft that they were used for socks. (290 years ago)
• The instinct to withdraw, to disappear far into the interior, figures often in Russian history.. Russia's strategic option of nearly unlimited retreat made it, in a sense, unkillable.
• To say that Russian was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.
• The Vologda road become a spill of pavement, untrimmed along its edges, with scalloping where the poured asphalt had flowed.
• Volodya took some water from our supply, gave the windshield a few splashes, crushed an unfiltered cigarette in his fingers, and using the tobacco as a solvent washed the bugs from the glass with big sweeps of his hand.

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"A Dirty Business" / George Packer
__ One former prosecutor compared the financial crisis to international narcotics trafficking, and insider trading to street-level drug dealing. Maybe a federal prosecutor couldn’t nail Scarface, but he could always go after Stringer Bell.
__ the sour knowingness of Anil Kumar

"The God of Gamblers" / Evan Osnos
__ In 2010, high rollers in Macau wagered about six hundred billion dollars, roughly the amount of cash withdrawn from all the A.T.M.s in America in a year.
__ I asked about a tiny white leather stool beside each table, and a staff member explained, “That’s for your handbag.”