For a week one recap of the Beijing Olympics, check out Anthony Lane’s piece in The New Yorker, The Only Games in Town. It’s snarky in a “David Sedaris does P.J. O’Rourke” kind of way:
On the principle that every Western visitor is a sucker, to be wooed into believing that the grass is greener inside the fence, they made sure that security measures were not hammered home like rivets but tricked out with homely detail. To leave your hotel in the morning and have your bag and your person searched before you board a bus to the Olympic Green, as if it were a plane, is no hardship; indeed, from a professional point of view, to be felt up and patted down with such eager regularity has given me the first, helpful hint as to what life was like for Jean Harlow.
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On every seat was a sack of goodies, and we were duly taught to rattle our drums, wave our Chinese flags, shake our funky light sticks, and finally, at the avian highlight of the ceremony, “imitate the movement of the doves with your hands.” Aside from the risk of developing repetitive wing injury, this