The New Yorker, 2006-10-09

[fiefoe]

"Afterlife Dept.: Skulduggery" / Tad Friend
__ At Malow’s house, the sisters took turns plucking out the skull’s canines and incisors. “We left the ones in the back, because it turns out that pulling teeth is like pulling teeth,”

"Tall For Its Age" / Richard Preston
__ Sixty metres above the ground - two hundred feet up - Hyperion is a little less than seven feet in diameter.

“What is a Novelist?” / Milan Kundera

• I have long seen youth as the lyrical age - that is, the age when the individual, ofcussed almost exclusively on himself... If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like aconversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.
• That (soft) gleam of the comical, suddenly discovered, is the silent, precious reward for the novelist's conversion.
• Like a woman who has applied makeup before hurrying to her first tryst, the world, when it rushes toward us at the moment of our birth, is already made-up, masked, reinterpreted.
• "Albertinko, ty" .. That name became for me, as an adolescent, the most captivating of all female names. {?!}
• The ethic of the essential has given way to the ethic of the archive. (The archive's ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous common grave.)
• Don Quixote... was the unexpected itself, and without the charm of the unexpected, no great novel character (and no great novel) would ever be conceivable again.

"Escaped" / Mark Singer

• McNair had reached into his pocket for a tube of lip balm, greased the inside of his handcuff, and slipped out.
• The provenance of various retrofittings since then - the chain-link and razor-wire fence, sensors that trigger an alarm when the fence is shaken, infrared motion detectors that do the same - can be traced, more or less directly, to McNair's exploits as an inmate. The only thing missing is a commemorative plaque.
• In a meticulously wrought ploy reminiscent of "The Count of Monte Cristo" - on that might well have required an accomplice or to - McNair configured the cargo aboard one pallet so that he could hide in a cavity that, even after shrink-wrapping, allowed him to breathe, with the aid of a snorkel-like cardboard tube.

"The Score" / Atul Gawande

• “The whole point of childbirth classes, as far as I could tell, is to make sure you keep your butt out of the hospital until you’re really in labor.”
• Finally, there is the maneuver that no one wanted to put his name to but that through history has saved many babies’ lives: you fracture the clavicles—the collar bones—and pull the baby out.
• Moreover, even if only because doctors are competitive, it drove them to want to produce better scores—and therefore better outcomes—for the newborns they delivered.
• With the forceps, though, there is a feel that is very hard to teach.” Just putting the forceps on a baby’s head is tricky. You have to choose the right one for the shape of the mother’s pelvis and the size of the child’s head—and there are at least half a dozen types of forceps. You have to slide the blades symmetrically along the sides, travelling exactly in the space between the ears and the eyes and over the cheekbones... Then a doctor must apply forces of both traction and compression—pulling, his chapter explained, with an average of forty to seventy pounds of axial force and five pounds of fetal skull compression.

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