The New Yorker, 2006-10-16

[fiefoe]

"Gizmo Dept.: Smart, Useless" / Nick Paumgarten

"The Dancing Life: Master Class" / Joan Acocella
__ His spine elongated; his shoulders moved back; even his cheekbones seemed to rise.

“Tabloid Days” / Robert Stone

• He also wrote the daily horoscopes,.. which allowed him to espouse principles such as surplus value in his interpretation of the stars.
• Description allows deeper penetration.. Language is the process that lashes experience to the intellect.
• Richie did once give us a nice story about two drunk caporegimes having a live-crab-eating contest at the Fulton Fish Market... This will suffice, I think, to illustrate why invented stories are so liberating and bright with possibility, which the true shit keeps you bound to a fallen world.

"The Formula" / Malcolm Gladwell

• Lord Kames... devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance.
• Finally, the computer gave “Crazy” a Periodicity Grade—which refers to the fact that, at any given time, only twelve to fifteen hit clusters are “active,” because from month to month the particular mathematical patterns that excite music listeners will shift around.
• “That’s not to deny that it matters whether the lead character wears a hat,” he added, in a way that suggested he and Mr. Brown had actually thought long and hard about leads and hats.
• Mr. Brown couldn’t remember a single script he’d read where he thought there wasn’t room for improvement, and Mr. Pink, when asked the same question, could come up with just one: “Lethal Weapon.”

"He Knew He Was Right" / Ian Parker

• Christopher Hitchens wrote in The Atlantic. “And this ability, so piercing and at times even alarming, is not mere knowingness. It is not, in other words, the product of cynicism. To be so perceptive and yet so innocent—that, in a phrase, is the achievement of Proust.”
• He told me that there was a student who, at different times, was his girlfriend and Clinton’s, before she began a lifetime of lesbianism.
• Hitchens is not hapless... but it’s unsettling to watch him rinse a single spoon for four minutes,

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