[Fiction] A couple, and a writing workshop: Her third story started out funny. It was about a woman who gave birth to a cat. The hero of the story was the husband, who suspected that the cat wasn’t his. A fat ginger tomcat that slept on the lid of the dumpster right below the window […]
The New Yorker
“We all knew there was no hope for anything to get better in North Korea,’’ she told me. “Sometimes we’d say, ‘Hey, if we crossed the river we’d be in China, but there are too many soldiers.’ ’’ Song-hee also knew that, if she crossed the border, she could be picked up by the Chinese […]
When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed […]
“Dear Residents of Tivoli Garden,” the don had written. “I hope you are all fine and this letter reaches everyone in the best of health. As for me I’m doing all right and my health conditions are fine.” Coke thanked Tivoli for sending him postcards and said he was sorry for the pain of the […]
Putin had a kind word for Monson (“a real man”) and paid Yemelianenko the ultimate compliment of Russian masculinity, calling him a “nastoyashii Russki bogatyr”—a genuine Russian hero. As Putin spoke, and as the national audience watched, many in the crowd started to jeer and whistle. This had never happened to Putin before, not once […]
The broadcast started at eight-thirty, with final predictions from the booth. Gruden looked solemn. “I think the Kansas City Chiefs are in real trouble tonight,” he said. Jaworski looked at Gruden and Mike Tirico. “You guys can call me crazy, but I’m excited about Tyler Palko tonight,” he said. Tirico giggled, but Gruden just squinted. […]
Why is the protest happening now? Why not in 2008, when Wall Street nearly collapsed, or 2009, when unemployment and foreclosures soared? For Ben-Moshe, Obama’s election seemed like the end of the battle, not the beginning, and it took her three years to return to the field. Garofalo thought that his generation needed to be […]
This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between Lasn and White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters […]
[Fiction] Since she’d arrived in America and got divorced, Ilona Siegal had been set up three times. The first man was not an ordinary man but a Ph.D. from Moscow, the friend who’d arranged the date said. When Ilona opened her door, she’d found the Ph.D. standing on her front steps in a pair of […]
Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the […]
