The New Yorker, 2008-08-04

[fiefoe]

"Sightings: Loose Lemur" / Ben McGrath

"Home Ec Dept.: Soup to Nettles" / Julia Ioffe
__ The nettles were the worst. Six stinging bushels had to be cleaned, boiled, drained, blanched, wrung, chopped, and reduced, finally, to a small pile you could hold in your hand. “I had four pots going,” Stivers-Isakova said. “I had to wear ziplock bags on my hands.”

Kelefa Sanneh: Nearly every project at the Smiley Group has had its own underwriters.

"Serving the Goddess" / William Dalrymple
__ Jamadagni belongs to that class of irascible holy men who fill Sanskrit literature with their fiery and unforgiving anger.
__ Successive waves of colonial and postcolonial legislation slowly broke the ancient links between the devadasis and the temples, driving the women out of the temple precincts and eroding their social, economic, and spiritual position.

"A Soldier’s Legacy" / Ben McGrath
__ (Five thousand dollars would buy a helmet sitting atop a standing machine gun, and twice that much added a pair of boots.)
__ Shay Hill showed up carrying a five-foot python in a pillowcase—Rogers’s pet, as it turned out, which had been left in Hill’s care. “I joked with Alan for the longest time,” Cathy told me. “I said, ‘You know, Alan, I finally saw a side of you that I didn’t know was there.’ I never took him to be a snake owner.”

"The Olympian" / David Remnick

• He is as sedentary as a veal calf in a dark shed.
• Vladimir de Pachmann, a Chopin specialist of a century ago who used to milk cows to exercise his fingers.
• There were more flowers on each table than at a Mob funeral.
• Lang Guoren, who would ride his son to classes each morning on the wobbly handlebars of an ancient bicycle, distinguished himself as the loudest of stage parents.
• “You’ve missed nearly two hours of practicing, and you can never get them back,” he shouted. “It’s too late for everything! Everything is ruined!” ... His rebellion lasted a few months. When he was ten, he was accepted at the Beijing conservatory.

"Her Own Society" / Judith Thurman
__ The theory that Dickinson was a lesbian shares a Dewey-decimal classification with a raft of other case studies—Emily the sufferer, performer, healer, seducer, victim, hysteric, dog lover, mystic, feminist paradigm, vestal daughter, consumptive, agoraphobic.

Peter Schjeldahl: It's a fashion auditioning as a sea change./ the last era when events crushed imagination

Anthony Lane:  anyone who is old enough to think that romance should avail itself of charm / hugely vain about their feelings

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