—The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath, finds out that, when it comes to little Austin, Bernie Ecclestone, the man who brought F1 to Texas, isn’t especially familiar with it, and vice-versa.
The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer’s life. BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
One persistent gray fellow (gray suit, gray hair, gray face, gray voice) got through the crowd, shoved a tape recorder toward him, and asked the obvious questions. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “I’m here for my friend’s memorial service. It’s not appropriate to do interviews.”
“You don’t understand,” the gray fellow said, sounding puzzled. “I’m from the Daily Telegraph. They’ve sent me down specially.”
“Gillon, I need your help,” he said.
Gillon leaned down toward the reporter from his immense height and said, firmly, and in his grandest accent, “Fuck off.”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” the man from the Telegraph said. “I’ve been to public school.”
After that, there was no more comedy.
I asked him what he thought Marx and Lenin would have done. The activist, shifting in his chair, replied, “When they are reincarnated, we must ask them.”
From Jake Halpern’s masterful story about the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple and its treasure, in Kerala, India. Even its poorest residents don’t want to sell off the 1$ billion treasure that’s been discovered (via court order) to be sealed inside the temple. The above quote refers to the fine line of the local Communist party walks between economics and religion.
“… A knowledgeable friend assures you that pianist X made the ‘definitive’ recording. You listen to X’s X and find it a bit boring. This is terrifying: what if that boringness is actually an artistic maturity that you have not yet attained? You rush back to the piano to play more boringly, in search of insight. This is not as easy as it sounds.”
It’s not online, but is worth seeking out.
In the past six years, soldiers from the Joint Special Operations Force, working with Iranian intelligence assets, put in place cutting-edge surveillance techniques, according to two former intelligence officers. Street signs were surreptitiously removed in heavily populated areas of Tehran—say, near a university suspected of conducting nuclear enrichment—and replaced with similar-looking signs implanted with radiation sensors. American operatives, working undercover, also removed bricks from a building or two in central Tehran that they thought housed nuclear-enrichment activities and replaced them with bricks embedded with radiation-monitoring devices.
High-powered sensors disguised as stones were spread randomly along roadways in a mountainous area where a suspected underground weapon site was under construction. The stones were capable of transmitting electronic data on the weight of the vehicles going in and out of the site; a truck going in light and coming out heavy could be hauling dirt—crucial evidence of excavation work. There is also constant satellite coverage of major suspect areas in Iran, and some American analysts were assigned the difficult task of examining footage in the hope of finding air vents—signs, perhaps, of an underground facility in lightly populated areas.
Read the whole piece here.
Source: newyorker.com
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