Read

I'm still reading the New Yorker. I'm just late on posting thoughts. But I keep dog-earing pages all the same.

Patricia Marx's piece on cars in the Aug. 16/23 issue isn't online, but it contained the fascinating detail that "historians partially attribute the failure of Ford's Edsel to the fact that its front grating looked too much like a pudendum." And Joan Acocella's article on Agatha Christie is likewise hidden but fabulous.

In the Aug. 30 issue, Ian Frazier goes back to Siberia and throws in as many interesting facts as he always does, including reports on the hunger of the prisoners once housed there:

In the gold-mining camps of the Kolyma region, farther east, some of the prisoners ate grass during the warmer months. Intellectuals, for unknown reasons, were more subject to that malady. People who ate grass generally did not live long. Varlam Shalamov, a writer who survived seventeen years in Kolyma, wrote about prisoners there during the war who ate half a barrel of machine grease from Lend-Lease before the guards drove them off with rifle shots. The prisoners had thought the machine grease might be butter; they said it tasted about as much like butter as American bread tasted like bread. They showed no ill effects afterward. In "The Gulag Archipelago," Solzhenitsyn tells of a work crew in Kolyma who were doing excavations when they came across a frozen-solid, perfectly preserved ancient stream, complete with prehistoric fish and salamanders. He said that a magazine of the Soviet Academy of Sciences reported that unfortunately these interesting specimens could not be studied, because the workers who unearthed them ate them on the spot.

One thing that's worth noting here, too, is the difference in Frazier's take on Stalin in this article:

...somehow Stalin gets a pass. People know he was horrible, but he has not yet been declared horrible officially. Hitler's minions were tried and convicted and (some of them) hanged, but the only trials examining the crimes of the Stalin regime were the absurd and obscene show trials he staged to give himself a cover for murdering more....During recent American elections, TV and other commentators sometimes quoted Stalin's remark "It's not the people who vote that count--it's the people who count the votes." As a comparison, is it possible to imagine under any commentator under any circumstances quoting a witty remark of Hitler's?...No doubt he benefits from the camouflage provided by the Russian leaders who went before; Hitler's crimes seemed unique in European history, but Stalin could be seen as another bloody tsar...

And Adam Gopnik's in his review of some new books on Winston Churchill:

There was a fine difference between Stalin and Satan, and Churchill grasped it. In Antony Beevor’s history of the Battle of Stalingrad, the brutality and waste of the Stalinist regime—prisoners left to die in the snow, political commissars ordering the execution of innocents, the dead of the great purges haunting the whole—is sickening. But the murderousness of the Nazi invaders—children killed en masse and buried in common graves—is satanic. It is the tragedy of modern existence that we have to make such distinctions. Yet that does not mean that such distinctions cannot be made, or that Churchill did not make them.

Those last two sentences are important ones and worthy of praise.