From The New Yorker, (2011/04/18, 2011/09, 2012/02/06)

[fiefoe]

"Working Titles" / Leslie T. Chang

• Certain professions have their own subgenres. The “commercial warfare novel” pits sales teams against each other in mortal combat over a large order. The “financial novel” wrings drama from stock prices. The “novel of officialdom,” which dates to imperial times, trades in the secrets and scandals of the bureaucracy.
• (In the literature of the Chinese workplace, renovation is an obsession akin to inheritance in the Victorian novel.)
• An egalitarian universe, the author implies, is one in which even an unconnected nobody can learn to buy off officials and subvert the law.
• Having taken their vows of poverty, the men got down to negotiations.

"The Grand Tour" / Evan Osnos

• He informed us that French scientists had determined that the optimal length of a tour guide’s lecture is seventy-five minutes. “Before Guide Li was aware of that, the longest speech I ever gave on a bus was four hours,” he added.
• At a Malaysian casino hotel in 2005, some three hundred Chinese visitors were issued special meal coupons bearing cartoon pig faces. The hotel said that the illustrations were simply to differentiate Chinese guests from Muslims, who don’t eat pork, but the offended Chinese tourists staged a sit-in, singing the national anthem.
• The air was charged with diligent curiosity.
• He couldn’t help but notice Milan’s abundant graffiti and overstuffed trash bins. As Li had explained it, “The government wants to clean, but it doesn’t have enough money.” Handy tried to be polite, but he said, “If it was like this in Shanghai, old folks would be calling us all afternoon to complain.”

"Better, Faster, Stronger" / Rebecca Mead
__ Rather, he prescribes a kind of hyperkinetic entrepreneurialism of the body and soul, with every man his own life coach, angel investor, Web master, personal trainer, and pharmaceutical test subject.
__ And it recommends funding all this by discovering a “muse,” which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as “an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.”

(The vibrator was made available as an over-the-counter treatment two decades later, when it was the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the fan, the toaster, and the teakettle;)

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