a stack of The New Yorker, 2011-2015
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fiefoe2011-12-05
"Mapping Home" / Aleksandar Hemon
__ I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.
__ In the seductive glow of inevitable catastrophe, the city appeared more beautiful than ever. By September, however, the complicated operations of denial were winding down. With troubling frequency, I found myself speculating about which of the buildings around me would provide good sniper positions. Yet, even as I envisioned myself and my fellow-citizens ducking under fire, I took those visions to be simply paranoid manifestations of the stress induced by the ubiquitous warmongering politics. I understand now that I was imagining incidents, as it was hard for me to imagine war in all its force, in much the same way that a young person can imagine the symptoms of an illness but finds it hard to imagine death: life seems so continuously, intensely present.
__ Nowadays in Sarajevo death is all too easy to imagine and is itself continuously, intensely present, but back then the city was fully alive, both inside me and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimensions, its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there is, a reality that swallows all, easily overriding any other mode of existence and levelling both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.
__ Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for “privacy” in Bosnian), your fellow-Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. If you somehow vanished, your fellow-citizens could have reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip that had accrued over years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city.
2012-01-23
William Finnegan: Nobody knows how long individual plowshares live. Captain James Cook took away a radiated tortoise, the plowshare's closest relative, and gave it to the King of Tonga, in 1777. It died in 1966.
Peter Schjeldahl on Hirst: the result is art in the way that some exotic financial dealings are legal: by a whisker.
2012-03-26
"Royal Flush" / Jonah Lehrer
__ The seduction of this decor, perhaps, is that it doesn't feel like a gambling environment. The beauty is a kind of anesthesia, distracting people from the pain of their inevitable losses.
__ Thomas's chairs need to accommodate any conceivable body type for as long as necessary, and he has become a student of repose, obsessed with the density of cushions and the weave of fabrics.
__ "No one in Vegas had ever put chandeliers over gambling tables before," Thomas says. "And that's because the fixture gets in the way of the security cameras.".. Thomas found a way to get a camera into the chandelier itself.
2013-12-09
Ullmann: "I am always quoting a sentence of Kierkegaarde's, even though he may not have written it. 'We come into this world with sealed orders.'"
James Wood: It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everybody else's, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one.. At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. Death give birth to the first question - Why? - and seems to kill all the answers.
"The Big Sleep" / Ian Parker
__ During the meeting, Herring would have access to a library of 2170 PowerPoint slides.
__ One of them had a tail of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. This tail helps to make LSD unusually effective at reaching the brain from the bloodstream.
__ Since the 70s, Stanford sleep scientists.. had bred narcoleptic dogs. This was an achievement in itself.
__ Mignot had done something very unusual: he had discovered the genetic cause of a condition, helped to reframe thinking about a fundamental human behavior, and revealed clear pharmaceutical opportunities.
__ In 2003, Merck conducted a computerized, robotized examination of almost every compound in the (3 million strong) library.
__ Colorcon, the world's leading supplier of tablet coatings, provides its clients with a pill-color chart... The chart can be overlaid with plastic sheets that are opaque but dotted with clear circles.. One sheet reveals the acceptable colors for pills in the E.U. and North America.
2013-12-16
"The Lost World" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ Extinction strikes us as an extremely obvious idea. It isn't.
__ Cuvier can be said to have theorized extinction.
__ "(Proboscideans) are a fascinating group... the trunk, which is a change of anatomy in the facial area that is truly extraordinary. It evolved separately five times."
__ Cuvier, on the basis of the engraving, determined - shockingly - that the animal was actually a flying reptile. He called it a _ptero-dactyle, meaning, "wing-fingered."
__ This pattern led Cuvier to another extraordinary insight about the history of life: it had a direction. Lost species whose remains could be found near the surface of the earth, like mastodons and cave bears, belonged to orders of creatures that were still alive.
"A Very Rare Book" / Nicholas Schmidle
__ Then De Caro set the oven in the kitchen to 250 degrees Celsius.. He placed a Pyrex dish with hydrochloric acid on the bottom rack, and, one by one, half-sheets of paper on the top rack. At that temperature, he said, "twenty minuets is like four hundred years." Vapors from the hydrochloric acid mimicked the effects of oxidation and transposed the black ink into rusty tones.
2013-12-23,30
"The Intelligent Plant" / Michael Pollan
__ Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”
__ Plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty distinct senses, including analogues of our five: smell and taste (they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies); sight (they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow); touch (a vine or a root “knows” when it encounters a solid object); and, it has been discovered, sound.
__ The last sentence of Darwin’s 1880 book, “The Power of Movement in Plants,” has assumed scriptural authority for some plant neurobiologists: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle … having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements.” Darwin was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and “brain” on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.
__ Mancuso speculates that the plant could be employing a form of echolocation. There is some evidence that plants make low clicking sounds as their cells elongate; it’s possible that they can sense the reflection of those sound waves bouncing off the metal pole.
__ Mancuso showed a slide depicting how trees in a forest organize themselves into far-flung networks, using the underground web of mycorrhizal fungi which connects their roots to exchange information and even goods. This “wood-wide web,” as the title of one paper put it, allows scores of trees in a forest to convey warnings of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need.
2014-01-27
Lizzie Widdicombe: Dean and I clambered over the wall (actually, a nice, muscular man behind us pushed me over it with about as much effort as it would have taken to tap a beach ball.)
2014-02-03
Ken Auletta: In 1991, Reed Hastings (of Netflix) launched a company called Pure Software, built around Purify, a popular computer program he'd created that identified bugs in software programs.
2014-03-10
Jon Lee Anderson: (After Ortega's reign in 1990): The country was so thoroughly hollowed out that the episode has become known as la panata.
2014-03-31
Jenny Offill:
__ We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.
__ He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us.
2014-05-26
"The Yips" / David Owen
In terms of the modern understanding of musician's cramp, the index patient is probably the concert pianist Leon Fleisher.
Botulinum injections are not a cure.. and they're more difficult to use in cases where the affected muscles are small and hard to isolate, as in the mouths of French-horn players.
"Word Magic" / Adam Gopnik
__ Back in the social sciences, there are studies to support our sense of such differences—not in cognitive view but in cultural flavor. Bilingual people, for instance, seem to narrate stories very differently in their two languages. Russian émigrés to America seem to use more collectivist nouns when they’re speaking Russian, more individualistic ones in English; bilingual French-English speakers tend to tell the same stories with an emphasis on “achievement” in English, and on “aggression toward peers” in French. (The English story is “I done it!”; the French version is “And the bastards tried to stop me.”)
__ We are not captives of our tongues, but we are citizens of our languages. And citizenship is a broad concept that includes behavior and rituals. We approach the secret life of another language more intimately on first approach than after we have married into it. Learning a new language is like learning a new city: you see things you’ll never notice, or need, once you go to live there and are habituated by routine. There’s even a very real sense in which it is easier to “think” in a foreign language if you don’t quite speak it than if you do.
2015-07-20
"The Really Big One" / Kathryn Schulz
__ Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.
__ The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence.
__ Yamaguchi and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. That time frame predated by more than a hundred years the written history of the Pacific Northwest—and so, by rights, the detective story should have ended there. <> But it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the ghost forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of 2011 made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese have kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness.
__ Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.
2015-08-10,17
"Learning to Speak Lingerie" / Peter Hessler
__ Their plant is in a small industrial zone in the desert west of Asyut, where it currently employs thirty people and grinds up about four tons of plastic every day. Lin and Chen sell the processed material to Chinese people in Cairo, who use it to manufacture thread. This thread is then sold to entrepreneurs in the Egyptian garment industry, including a number of Chinese. It’s possible that a bottle tossed onto the side of the road in Asyut will pass through three stages of Chinese processing before returning to town in the form of lingerie, also to be sold by Chinese.
__ But, whenever I visit, I can’t help thinking: Here in Egypt, home to eighty-five million people, where Western development workers and billions of dollars of foreign aid have poured in for decades, the first plastic-recycling center in the south is a thriving business that employs thirty people, reimburses others for reducing landfill waste, and earns a significant profit. So why was it established by two lingerie-fuelled Chinese migrants, one of them illiterate and the other with a fifth-grade education?
__ Egypt is full of grandiose and misguided projects in the desert, both ancient and modern, and TEDA is one of the strangest: a lost Chinese factory town in the Sahara, where Ozymandian dreams have been foiled by a simple failure to get women out of their homes.
2015-09-14
"Omission" / John McPhee
__ I give them thirty-two lines of Joseph Conrad “going up that river . . . like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.” Green 3, if you dare. I give them Thomas McGuane’s ode to the tarpon as grand piano (twenty lines, Green 3), Irving Stone’s passionate declaration of his love of stone (nine lines, Green 1), Philip Roth’s character Lonoff the novelist describing the metronomic boredom of the writing process in prose that metronomically repeats itself to make its point (try greening that), twenty-five lines, Green 3. I ask them to look up the first three pieces they have written for the course, to choose the one they preferred working on, then green ten per cent. And I give them the whole of the Gettysburg Address (twenty-five lines, Green 3). Memorization and familiarity have made that difficult, yes, but scarcely impossible. For example, if you green the latter part of sentence 9 and the first part of sentence 10, you can attach the head of 9 to the long tail of 10 and pick up twenty-four words, nine per cent of Abraham Lincoln’s famously compact composition:
1. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here
10. to the great task remaining before us . . .
"Holy Orders" / Alexander Stille
__ "When we started our work, we were told that the Holy See comprises some 65 different institutions," Casey said. "We have determined that the correct number is 136."
2016-03-21
Laura Parker: By head count, the entomology department contributes the majority of the museum's thirty-three-million-strong collection of specimens. "Certainly, we have the most by leg count."
Judith Thurman: 'You get upward mobility with Guo Pei, but not the forward kind."
"Mapping Home" / Aleksandar Hemon
__ I idled in coffee shops, drinking coffee that tasted like burned corn, instead of the foamy pungency I remembered from before the war. Everything around me was both familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.
__ In the seductive glow of inevitable catastrophe, the city appeared more beautiful than ever. By September, however, the complicated operations of denial were winding down. With troubling frequency, I found myself speculating about which of the buildings around me would provide good sniper positions. Yet, even as I envisioned myself and my fellow-citizens ducking under fire, I took those visions to be simply paranoid manifestations of the stress induced by the ubiquitous warmongering politics. I understand now that I was imagining incidents, as it was hard for me to imagine war in all its force, in much the same way that a young person can imagine the symptoms of an illness but finds it hard to imagine death: life seems so continuously, intensely present.
__ Nowadays in Sarajevo death is all too easy to imagine and is itself continuously, intensely present, but back then the city was fully alive, both inside me and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimensions, its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there is, a reality that swallows all, easily overriding any other mode of existence and levelling both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.
__ Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for “privacy” in Bosnian), your fellow-Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. If you somehow vanished, your fellow-citizens could have reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip that had accrued over years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city.
2012-01-23
William Finnegan: Nobody knows how long individual plowshares live. Captain James Cook took away a radiated tortoise, the plowshare's closest relative, and gave it to the King of Tonga, in 1777. It died in 1966.
Peter Schjeldahl on Hirst: the result is art in the way that some exotic financial dealings are legal: by a whisker.
2012-03-26
"Royal Flush" / Jonah Lehrer
__ The seduction of this decor, perhaps, is that it doesn't feel like a gambling environment. The beauty is a kind of anesthesia, distracting people from the pain of their inevitable losses.
__ Thomas's chairs need to accommodate any conceivable body type for as long as necessary, and he has become a student of repose, obsessed with the density of cushions and the weave of fabrics.
__ "No one in Vegas had ever put chandeliers over gambling tables before," Thomas says. "And that's because the fixture gets in the way of the security cameras.".. Thomas found a way to get a camera into the chandelier itself.
2013-12-09
Ullmann: "I am always quoting a sentence of Kierkegaarde's, even though he may not have written it. 'We come into this world with sealed orders.'"
James Wood: It is just a life, one of millions, as arbitrary as everybody else's, a named tenancy that will soon become a nameless one.. At the very moment we play at being God, we also work against God, hurl down the script, refuse the terms of the drama, appalled by the meaninglessness and ephemerality of existence. Death give birth to the first question - Why? - and seems to kill all the answers.
"The Big Sleep" / Ian Parker
__ During the meeting, Herring would have access to a library of 2170 PowerPoint slides.
__ One of them had a tail of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. This tail helps to make LSD unusually effective at reaching the brain from the bloodstream.
__ Since the 70s, Stanford sleep scientists.. had bred narcoleptic dogs. This was an achievement in itself.
__ Mignot had done something very unusual: he had discovered the genetic cause of a condition, helped to reframe thinking about a fundamental human behavior, and revealed clear pharmaceutical opportunities.
__ In 2003, Merck conducted a computerized, robotized examination of almost every compound in the (3 million strong) library.
__ Colorcon, the world's leading supplier of tablet coatings, provides its clients with a pill-color chart... The chart can be overlaid with plastic sheets that are opaque but dotted with clear circles.. One sheet reveals the acceptable colors for pills in the E.U. and North America.
2013-12-16
"The Lost World" / Elizabeth Kolbert
__ Extinction strikes us as an extremely obvious idea. It isn't.
__ Cuvier can be said to have theorized extinction.
__ "(Proboscideans) are a fascinating group... the trunk, which is a change of anatomy in the facial area that is truly extraordinary. It evolved separately five times."
__ Cuvier, on the basis of the engraving, determined - shockingly - that the animal was actually a flying reptile. He called it a _ptero-dactyle, meaning, "wing-fingered."
__ This pattern led Cuvier to another extraordinary insight about the history of life: it had a direction. Lost species whose remains could be found near the surface of the earth, like mastodons and cave bears, belonged to orders of creatures that were still alive.
"A Very Rare Book" / Nicholas Schmidle
__ Then De Caro set the oven in the kitchen to 250 degrees Celsius.. He placed a Pyrex dish with hydrochloric acid on the bottom rack, and, one by one, half-sheets of paper on the top rack. At that temperature, he said, "twenty minuets is like four hundred years." Vapors from the hydrochloric acid mimicked the effects of oxidation and transposed the black ink into rusty tones.
2013-12-23,30
"The Intelligent Plant" / Michael Pollan
__ Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”
__ Plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty distinct senses, including analogues of our five: smell and taste (they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies); sight (they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow); touch (a vine or a root “knows” when it encounters a solid object); and, it has been discovered, sound.
__ The last sentence of Darwin’s 1880 book, “The Power of Movement in Plants,” has assumed scriptural authority for some plant neurobiologists: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle … having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements.” Darwin was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and “brain” on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.
__ Mancuso speculates that the plant could be employing a form of echolocation. There is some evidence that plants make low clicking sounds as their cells elongate; it’s possible that they can sense the reflection of those sound waves bouncing off the metal pole.
__ Mancuso showed a slide depicting how trees in a forest organize themselves into far-flung networks, using the underground web of mycorrhizal fungi which connects their roots to exchange information and even goods. This “wood-wide web,” as the title of one paper put it, allows scores of trees in a forest to convey warnings of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need.
2014-01-27
Lizzie Widdicombe: Dean and I clambered over the wall (actually, a nice, muscular man behind us pushed me over it with about as much effort as it would have taken to tap a beach ball.)
2014-02-03
Ken Auletta: In 1991, Reed Hastings (of Netflix) launched a company called Pure Software, built around Purify, a popular computer program he'd created that identified bugs in software programs.
2014-03-10
Jon Lee Anderson: (After Ortega's reign in 1990): The country was so thoroughly hollowed out that the episode has become known as la panata.
2014-03-31
Jenny Offill:
__ We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.
__ He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us.
2014-05-26
"The Yips" / David Owen
In terms of the modern understanding of musician's cramp, the index patient is probably the concert pianist Leon Fleisher.
Botulinum injections are not a cure.. and they're more difficult to use in cases where the affected muscles are small and hard to isolate, as in the mouths of French-horn players.
"Word Magic" / Adam Gopnik
__ Back in the social sciences, there are studies to support our sense of such differences—not in cognitive view but in cultural flavor. Bilingual people, for instance, seem to narrate stories very differently in their two languages. Russian émigrés to America seem to use more collectivist nouns when they’re speaking Russian, more individualistic ones in English; bilingual French-English speakers tend to tell the same stories with an emphasis on “achievement” in English, and on “aggression toward peers” in French. (The English story is “I done it!”; the French version is “And the bastards tried to stop me.”)
__ We are not captives of our tongues, but we are citizens of our languages. And citizenship is a broad concept that includes behavior and rituals. We approach the secret life of another language more intimately on first approach than after we have married into it. Learning a new language is like learning a new city: you see things you’ll never notice, or need, once you go to live there and are habituated by routine. There’s even a very real sense in which it is easier to “think” in a foreign language if you don’t quite speak it than if you do.
2015-07-20
"The Really Big One" / Kathryn Schulz
__ Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.
__ The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence.
__ Yamaguchi and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. That time frame predated by more than a hundred years the written history of the Pacific Northwest—and so, by rights, the detective story should have ended there. <> But it did not. If you travel five thousand miles due west from the ghost forest, you reach the northeast coast of Japan. As the events of 2011 made clear, that coast is vulnerable to tsunamis, and the Japanese have kept track of them since at least 599 A.D. In that fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness.
__ Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.
2015-08-10,17
"Learning to Speak Lingerie" / Peter Hessler
__ Their plant is in a small industrial zone in the desert west of Asyut, where it currently employs thirty people and grinds up about four tons of plastic every day. Lin and Chen sell the processed material to Chinese people in Cairo, who use it to manufacture thread. This thread is then sold to entrepreneurs in the Egyptian garment industry, including a number of Chinese. It’s possible that a bottle tossed onto the side of the road in Asyut will pass through three stages of Chinese processing before returning to town in the form of lingerie, also to be sold by Chinese.
__ But, whenever I visit, I can’t help thinking: Here in Egypt, home to eighty-five million people, where Western development workers and billions of dollars of foreign aid have poured in for decades, the first plastic-recycling center in the south is a thriving business that employs thirty people, reimburses others for reducing landfill waste, and earns a significant profit. So why was it established by two lingerie-fuelled Chinese migrants, one of them illiterate and the other with a fifth-grade education?
__ Egypt is full of grandiose and misguided projects in the desert, both ancient and modern, and TEDA is one of the strangest: a lost Chinese factory town in the Sahara, where Ozymandian dreams have been foiled by a simple failure to get women out of their homes.
2015-09-14
"Omission" / John McPhee
__ I give them thirty-two lines of Joseph Conrad “going up that river . . . like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.” Green 3, if you dare. I give them Thomas McGuane’s ode to the tarpon as grand piano (twenty lines, Green 3), Irving Stone’s passionate declaration of his love of stone (nine lines, Green 1), Philip Roth’s character Lonoff the novelist describing the metronomic boredom of the writing process in prose that metronomically repeats itself to make its point (try greening that), twenty-five lines, Green 3. I ask them to look up the first three pieces they have written for the course, to choose the one they preferred working on, then green ten per cent. And I give them the whole of the Gettysburg Address (twenty-five lines, Green 3). Memorization and familiarity have made that difficult, yes, but scarcely impossible. For example, if you green the latter part of sentence 9 and the first part of sentence 10, you can attach the head of 9 to the long tail of 10 and pick up twenty-four words, nine per cent of Abraham Lincoln’s famously compact composition:
1. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here
10. to the great task remaining before us . . .
"Holy Orders" / Alexander Stille
__ "When we started our work, we were told that the Holy See comprises some 65 different institutions," Casey said. "We have determined that the correct number is 136."
2016-03-21
Laura Parker: By head count, the entomology department contributes the majority of the museum's thirty-three-million-strong collection of specimens. "Certainly, we have the most by leg count."
Judith Thurman: 'You get upward mobility with Guo Pei, but not the forward kind."
