The New Yorker, 2013-11-18, 2014-03-03, 2014-05-05

[fiefoe]

"Thanksgiving in Mongolia" / Ariel Levy

"Hot Grease" / John Colapinto
__ The best grease, two per cent or less, usually comes from high-volume places that change out their grease frequently, preferably big chicken chains - Popeye's, Church's - because poultry doesn't break up much and contaminate the oil.
__ Competitors are not above spreading rancid grease around to make a rival look bad.

"The Buried" / Peter Hessler
__ Only then was the wheel introduced, well over a thousand years after the most impressive pyramids were built.
__ The Germans discovered it in the ruins of a sculptor's studio, along with other unfinished busts of the Queen (Nefertiti), all of them discarded like yesterday's propaganda.

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"A Star in a Bottle" / Raffi Khatchadourian

• From the outset, each Domestic Agency vied to build the machine’s state-of-the-art components, so that its industries could gain the know-how; as a result, the design and the manufacture of the most sophisticated parts have been split apart in ways that are politically expedient but are at odds with engineering prudence. A single manufacturer should build ITER’s vacuum chamber, a high-precision device that must operate with perfect symmetry. Instead, it will be constructed in nine segments, two in Korea and the rest in Europe... The Praetorian Guard, with little more than the power of persuasion, must insure that the device is whole.
• Spitzer knew that the ionized gas, with its free-floating charged particles, would respond to magnetic fields. Perhaps, he reasoned, a system of magnets could contain a thermonuclear cloud in a vacuum. The plasma would never have to touch a thing.
• As the concrete set, it was precisely levelled: a tilt of more than an eighth of an inch spanning ten feet was unacceptable.
• Merely containing it long enough to heat was a challenge. One had only to look at the surface of the sun—a roiling sea of plasma instability—to see why. One scientist compared the effort to holding jelly in rubber bands.
• Neutrons that drive into the wall of the steel vacuum chamber will cause gaseous bubbles to cavitate within it, diminishing the integrity of the chamber. In a commercial reactor, the neutrons, like a billiard break, would rearrange the entire molecular structure of key components. “Imagine a substance where every atom is displaced every two weeks,... The material completely remakes itself!”

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"Pilgrim Mothers" / Sarah Payne Stuart

• Approaching their nineties, they could be seen standing, stalwart or bent, outside their pretty houses at 9 A.M., waiting to be picked up by another octogenarian millionaire in an inexpensive car on the way to a meet-the-candidate coffee or a prison-outreach meeting.
• Suburban ladies in novels set elsewhere might go shopping and return home bemused because there was nothing left to buy, but the Concord matrons had no time for such frivolity. Since the beginning of time, the ladies of Concord have been sketching and painting with the clear-sighted purpose of finishing pictures to put them in art shows and sell them to one another.
• And so I had held open a pillowcase while she plunked in two-fisted clomps of mismatched silver: old carving knives stabbing through the bottom of the pillowcase, salad forks, fish forks, finger bowls, ornate tea-strainer spoons, and other oddly fashioned implements for outmoded dining practices—a Santa’s bag of treasures streaming out like unconditional love.

"The Hunt for El Chapo" / Patrick Radden Keefe
Normally the friction of a battering ram would heat the steel, rendering it more pliable. But the door was custom-made: inside the steel skin, it was filled with water, so that if anyone tried to break it down the heat from the impact would not spread.