"Now the turkey's sulking."

While I was sitting in Huerequeque's bar, next to me a pig kept rubbing with self-absorbed persistence against a case of beer. Then it disappeared behind the counter. A broom was lying on the ground as if felled by an assassin.

-from Werner Herzog's astonishing Fitzcarraldo diaries (in the current Paris Review)

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One way to keep publishing afloat: a judge sentences a crooked exec to write a book.

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In 1983, Motorola introduced the first commercially available cellular phones to the United States. Here, their designers imagine what we might see in the next twenty-five years (but possibly never).

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Sophisticated nuclear strategists also speak a language all their own. They are gradually evolving a terminology which is free of moral, or even human, connotation. They do not, for example, use any form of the word attack, but use instead the term preempt--which of course sounds like something in a bridge game rather than what it is.

-Terry Southern, quoted in Bilge Ebiri's essay on Dr. Strangelove and the "dead serious" novel that inspired it