The New Yorker, 2014-01-13, 2014-05-19

"The People Who Pass" / Adam Gopnik
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/the-people-who-pass

__ Four French cops watch carefully from no more than ten feet away—smiling slightly to one another while remaining fixed in place, demonstrating the usual conviction of the French police that the human comedy as it unfolds is so absorbing that to intervene and impose artificial order upon it would be inartistic.
__ Cirque Tzigane... the most soulful and sporadically incompetent in the world,

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"Cleanup Crew" / Ian Parker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/cleanup-crew
__ She recognized one oversight: the sinks in the men’s locker room were too small—she mimed a recycling professional rinsing his hands in a soup bowl.

"Partial Recall" / Michael Specter
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/partial-recall

• The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist,” Kandel wrote in his book “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” (2006). “Thus, if you remember anything of this book, it will be because your brain is slightly different after you have finished reading it.”
• Nader... had demonstrated that the very act of remembering something makes it vulnerable to change. Like a text recalled from a computer’s hard drive, each memory was subject to editing.
• But she added that reconsolidation raises a paradox: in order to update our most painful memories, we have to revisit them. That is never easy to do.
• It’s not clear if the experience has altered his memory of those events. But it has transformed his daughter’s memories of him, and of her own life. She told me that she realized memory is “what you are now, not what you think you were in the past. When you change the story you created, you change your life. I created the story and brought these memories together, and now my past is different from the past I had before.

"A Voice From the Past" / Alec Wilkinson
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/a-voice-from-the-past
__ “Restoration implies choices,” Haber said. “Preservation implies stabilizing. With preservation, you want to leave the data clean.”

"The World As We Know It" / James Wood
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/the-world-as-we-know-it

• If knowingness is capitalism’s gift to those metropolitan élites who haven’t earned it, there are also multitudes of people, constrained by poverty and political oppression and the bad luck of obscurity, who don’t deserve the brutal “knowledge” that is being meted out daily on their lives; they would be very grateful for the privileges of knowingness. And, by the way, would you, in Paris or New York or London, really rather know less, as the price of being less knowing?
• One of the novel’s epigraphs is a quotation from “Middlemarch”: “All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
• Zafar, the good mathematician, also distrusts metaphors, and complains that they never tell you what actually happened, “how it happened, or why it happened. . . . If metaphors increase our understanding, they do so only because they take us back to a familiar vantage, which is to say that a metaphor cannot bring anything nearer. Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.”