The New Yorker, 2007-12-03
Feb. 10th, 2008 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoe"Local Government: The Pigeon Police" / Ben McGrath
__ The anticipation seemed to be making him paranoid. “Yesterday, I was having lunch in City Hall Park with a colleague, and this squirrel comes over, literally up to my feet, and he stands up,” Felder said. “I’m eating a bar of chocolate. I said, ‘What, are you kidding? You’re with them?’ It ran away, but five minutes later dozens of pigeons, like something out of some spook movie, show up, and they’re all over the place.
Frances FitzGerald: Church-growth consulting has become a small industry.
"Darwin’s Surprise" / Michael Specter
__ a Fascist-leaning group known as the Young Muslims, which served as a kind of proving ground for the Handjar, a Muslim division of the S.S.
"Red, White, and Bleu" / Bill Buford
__ His fatback is fried and served in a paper cone.
"Nan, American Man" / John Updike
__ Nan agrees: “Compared with written Chinese, English was indeed a language of common people, despite being hard to master, its grammatical rules too loose and its idioms defying logic.” Elsewhere, becoming a handy American householder, he thinks, “Now he loved hand tools—oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.” This exacting language is “like a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, {My word!}
Simón Bolívar Orchestra: Mambo (via Alex Ross)
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__ The anticipation seemed to be making him paranoid. “Yesterday, I was having lunch in City Hall Park with a colleague, and this squirrel comes over, literally up to my feet, and he stands up,” Felder said. “I’m eating a bar of chocolate. I said, ‘What, are you kidding? You’re with them?’ It ran away, but five minutes later dozens of pigeons, like something out of some spook movie, show up, and they’re all over the place.
Frances FitzGerald: Church-growth consulting has become a small industry.
"Darwin’s Surprise" / Michael Specter
- A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell’s DNA. {Did I ever learn this in school?}
- AIDS virus, for example, has one gene, called “vif,” that does nothing but block a protein whose sole job is to stop the virus from making copies of itself. It simply takes that protein into the cellular equivalent of a trash can; if not for that gene, H.I.V. might have been a trivial disease.
- Malik is an engaging and voluble exception. When an antiviral protein excites him, he doesn’t hold back. “Where but in evolutionary history can you see a story like this, with PtERV and the chimps?’’
__ a Fascist-leaning group known as the Young Muslims, which served as a kind of proving ground for the Handjar, a Muslim division of the S.S.
"Red, White, and Bleu" / Bill Buford
__ His fatback is fried and served in a paper cone.
"Nan, American Man" / John Updike
__ Nan agrees: “Compared with written Chinese, English was indeed a language of common people, despite being hard to master, its grammatical rules too loose and its idioms defying logic.” Elsewhere, becoming a handy American householder, he thinks, “Now he loved hand tools—oh, the infinite varieties of American tools, each designed for one purpose, just like the vast English vocabulary, each word denoting precisely one thing or one idea.” This exacting language is “like a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, {My word!}
Simón Bolívar Orchestra: Mambo (via Alex Ross)
<<
