The New Yorker, 2007-02-12 +

[fiefoe]

"The Fixer" / Ken Auletta
Former President Harry Truman was in town, and Rubenstein fearlessly telephoned his hotel, somehow getting through to make his offer: five thousand dollars to the Truman Library if the President would appear with Morgenstern to accept the donation. Truman agreed, and Howard Rubenstein had greased his first big wheel.

“Two Heads” / Larissa MacFarquhar
__ when a split-brain patient would be reading a newspaper, .. the right brain gets bored as hell.. the person would find that his left hadn would suddenly grad the newspaper and throw it to the ground!
__ Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels now "pain" but something more complicated - first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers

"Missing Link" / Jonathan Rosen
__ Wallace never did abandon natural selection, but later generations came to find him an unfit parent.
__ “Infinite Tropics: An Alfred Russel Wallace Anthology,” edited by Andrew Berry

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"Real Romance" / Lauren Collins (from The New Yorker, June 22, 2009)

• "The classic British romances focussed on the war between the sexes," Isabel Swift.. said. "With Nora, it was more of a challenge than a real battle of wills."
• Sentimentality cloaked in snappiness- whether in imitation of Rober or by promixity to her- is the site's prevailing register.
• Robert's persona is nurturing - for hiccups.
• Romances is not a genre that suffers slow, or abstracted, authors.
• There were nods to Georgette Heyer.. and Connie Brockway ("You are my country, Desdemona... My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining"). {My all-time favorite quoted sentence in this magazine!!}
• In a 1981 survey... the romance readers in her sample gorup considered the depiction of rape only slightly less objectionable than a sad ending.
• Roberts' rule of thumb: "one cliche per story."
• According to industry legend, a book tanked when its publisher omitted from its cover the single light that customarily shines from an upper window of a gray-stone castle.
• In both incarnations, she is spare, catchy, and impressionistic.
• She pokes fun at the pace of life on a cattle ranch: "Ham blew out smoke, watched it drift to the ceiling. Willa imagined cities being built, leveled, new stars being born, novas."

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