From Harper’s Weekly Review:
The government of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has ruled for 38 years and whose official title is “Princely Exalted Supreme Great Commander of Gloriously Victorious Troops,” disqualified the country’s main opposition party for the second parliamentary election in a row.
I’m always a few issues behind in my New Yorker reading, primarily because there’s so much in there.
Theoretically, everything in the New Yorker could hook me. Brilliant long journalism can cause a reader to loose track of anything but the story, so that a deep read could consume hours of one’s life and cause one to emerge from the story, blinking and shaking one’s head, like waking up from a full night’s dream.
The other day, while involved with a recent edition, I came upon a story categorized as Brave New World Dept., about “The biotech startups that want to revolutionize human reproduction.” And I queried the magazine, “Do I need to know about revolutionizing human reproduction? Whatever that is?”
My answer to my question was, “Not I.”
So I turned the pages, after clipping an excellent cartoon to send to my brother-in-law, “Baseball Has New Rules For 2023 But Why Stop There?” And arrived at an article about Taco Bell, and how a woman who worked for the chain as a product developer became, uh, sort of obsessed with folding tortillas into hexagon shapes so you could eat one with one hand while driving a car with the other hand and the fillings wouldn’t fall out and land on your lap.
Curious. I read enough to grasp the purport summarized above and said, “No, no Taco Bell.” So that was it for the Taco Bell story.
And again I turned the pages, whereupon I saw, “Security Breach: Criminals presumed that a new kind of phone network couldn’t be infiltrated by cops. Big mistake.” Oh yeah! I’m reading every single word written by Ed Caesar and recalling how I once thought I’d love to work for an intelligence service that could listen in on criminals’ encrypted calls and texts. This is the next best thing.
So that’s why I read the New Yorker. Just when I begin to wonder whether a particular issue will supply me with a good read, here comes learning how Montenegro is possibly the most corrupt country in the world, and why.
By the way, it seems to me that while the hide-and-seek technology involving criminal communications has progressed from early wiretapping, the communications themselves — and the crimes and corruption they facilitate — are pretty much the same.
(If you’re not attracted to an international thriller in the form of a New Yorker story, the Taco Bell story can be found in the April 24 and May 1 double issue, starting on page 26.)
I spend too much time scrolling down various Facebook videos and such. I’m slightly hypnotized — as well as bored — by those “20 actors and what they look like now,” or whatever.
Today, it hit me more or less in the face. If an actor is named Chris, I will never be able to identify him. And I mean, I can’t name the actor before he’s identified as a Chris.
Are all the actors named Chris the same guy?
