The New Yorker, at random

[fiefoe]

__ In 1897, to move mail around the city, Manhattan started to equip itself with an island-wide system of underground pneumatic tubes.
__ Our obsession with innovation also blinds us to how much of technology is focussed on keeping things the same.
__ Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments.

As Schiffman puts it, our taste for sweeteners is being "upregulated." <> The closest analogy may be what has happened to out sense of pitch. In 1740.. an A above middle C had a frequency of four hundred and twenty-two hertz. Throughout the nineteenth century, orchestras where tuning it higher, straining to fill larger and larger halls and make their sound just a little more brilliant. These days, when Lorin Maazel rings his tuning fork, that same A gives a steady pitch of four hundred and forty hertz.  (Burkhard Bilger - "Building a better sugar substitute" 05/06)

 __ An S.U.V. embodies the opposite logic. The vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it. 
 __ We live in an age, after all, that is strangely fixated on the idea of helplessness: we're fascinated by hurricanes and terrorist acts and epidemics like sars—situations in which we feel powerless to affect our own destiny.

__ Episodic memory depends on the perception of particular and often unique events, and one’s memories of such events, like one’s original perception of them, are not only highly individual (colored by one’s interests, concerns, and values) but prone to be revised or recategorized every time they are recalled. This is in fundamental contrast to procedural memory, where it is all-important that the remembering be literal, exact, and reproducible.
 __ Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. . . . Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.

__ Every age finds an activity that can take place while a character is meditating; the activity surrounds and halos the meditation. In Victorian fiction, it is walking; the character takes a long walk from Little Tipping to Old Stornsbury and, on the way, decides to propose, convert, escape, or run for office... In recent American fiction, driving was recessive enough to do the job;
__ The act of reading is always a matter of a task begun as much as of a message understood, something that begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.

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