Word: yorkers
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...volume of correspondence now and then and read a letter here and there, but he never gets any connected idea of what the man is trying to say and abandons the book for the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier." --James Thurber (from "The Letters of James Thurber." The New Yorker...
Basketball meets the specs. Basketball has the grand gestures, the open conflict, the darkness of the soul visible. Leave baseball to The New Yorker and those who pine for a simpler time; leave football to Howard Cosell; leave hockey to Canada, Only basketball wears the problems of America--of all America--on its sleeve. From drugs to inflation to (especially) race, basketball has them all. It is a troubled institution in a troubled time--Halberstam territory...
...would, however, not be to find out whether that redoubtable wit could drop a line or two over breakfast like those he penned for the Marx Brothers, nor to determine if he poured forth in conversation the astonishing, almost Nabokovian, word-play that runs through his myriad of New Yorker stories. Perelman would certainly have proven disappointing on these counts--no one could do off the cuff what he so meticulously crafted. Instead, one would meet Perelman to find out one thing--How much of that literary schmendrick persona that appears over and over again in his stories...
...Crazy Like a Fox and The Road to Miltdown. The writing in the last volume he published while alive, Eastward Ha! was somehow less densely funny, less wildly allusive than it had been before. The pieces in The Last Laugh, all of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, represent more of the same. In these last stories Perelman drifts more and more into a cosmic nostalgia which he fails to connect to anything relevant to non-octagenarian readers, Stories like And Then the Whining Schoolboy With His Satchel, in which the 15-year-old Perelmanesque character finds himself accused...
Some folk tales are based at least partly on fact. What New Yorker has not heard of the giant alligators that prowl the city's sewer system, descendants of smaller ones brought home from Florida vacations and flushed down the toilet? Brunvand cites evidence that a few underground gators may have existed. Yet a modern legend's staying power seems to have little to do with its veracity. Since the late 1960s, there have been reports from around the country of shoppers in discount stores being bitten by poisonous snakes or insects hidden in some piece of imported...