The New Yorker, a couple of profiles

[fiefoe]

"Man of Extremes" / Dana Goodyear

• “When I say, ‘Make me three to one,’ what I’m saying is ‘Make me eighteen feet tall,’ ” he said. “At that point, I’ve become a techno crane. If I say, ‘Make me twenty to one,’ I’m a helicopter.”
• “Look at the gill-like membrane on the side of the mouth, its transmission of light, all the secondary color saturation on the tongue, and that maxilla bone. "
• Hamilton spent a year on a merciless fat-free diet, and trained with a former Mossad agent, who taught her to strip weapons blindfolded while he threw things at her and asked for her identification number. She got so that she could escape from L.A.P.D. handcuffs using just a paper clip.
• To break up the water surface and minimize reflection, the tank was filled with tiny black polypropylene beads, which made their way into noses, ears, and mouths. Infections were rampant, even though the water had enough chlorine in it to turn an electric-blue dive suit gray in a day or two, and bleach the hair and eyebrows of the crew albino-white.
• Someone sprinkled PCP in the chowder... Cameron had the presence of mind to stick his finger down his throat, and was one of the few who didn’t spend the night in the emergency room.
• His face was flushed and happy. “It’s all just an excuse to do helicopters versus pterodactyls,” he said.

"The Deflationist" / Larissa MacFarquhar

• Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.”
• Once an industry started up in one place, for whatever reason (the carpet industry in Dalton appears to have its origin in a local teen-ager who in 1895 made a tufted bedspread as a wedding present), local workers became trained in its methods, skilled workers from elsewhere moved there, and related businesses sprang up close by.
• (Larry Summers, a saltwater type, once began a paper on finance by declaring “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around”)
• As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”
• I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.

"The Third Man" / Michael Korda
__ He was photographed standing behind Torrijos and President Carter at the signing of the Panama Canal treaty,

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