The New Yorker, (2002-11-11,2007-05-07}

[fiefoe]

"The Next Crash" / John Cassidy (with the subtitle ''Is the housing market a bubble that's about to burst?')

Cartoon with a couple sitting around a table: "Natalie Collins, right, of Brookfield, CT, is seen celebrating her victory over husband Ted after a quick game of "Disparate Memories."
Cartoon of a cocktail party, with a general pointing at the badges on his military uniform: "This one's for deterring. That one's for preempting."

Gopnik on Herbert Abury's "Gangs of New York":
__ It was the place where the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies and the Shirt Tails had lived and fought.
__ Asbury was, above all, a realist, and in the American sense; that is, a man who wants to annoy his relatives.

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"The Conciliator" / Marissa MacFarquhar
__ (Obama).. talked about wanting to be mayor of Chicago, and since people tend for some reason to tolerate - indeed, to delight in- considerably more eccentricity and dubious conduct in mayors than they do in other elected officials, it may be that he wrote ("Dreams from My Father") with that ambition in mind.
__ Obama's mother is, in his portrayal, an American innocent out of Henry James: a young girl who ventures into the world believing that things are as they seem to be; that a person's story begins when she is born and her relations with other people begin when she meets them; that you can leave your home without fear of injury or loneliness because people everywhere are more or less alike.

"The Idol Thief" / Patrick Radden Keefe
__ Torture and coercive interrogation are such a common feature of the Indian criminal-justice system that confessions given to police officers are not admissible in court.

Ralph Waldo Ellison in 1841 lecture “Man the Reformer”: “As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.”

Anthony Lane: Both (Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron) are obsessed with shape-shifters - with their sad restlessness, their ability to conjure threat out of the apparently fragile.

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