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Elsewhere in vulgarity: In June Steve Bogira read John McPhee's lovely New Yorker reminiscence of that august magazine's acceptance of swearwords, which has been slow but sure. And how. Catching up on last week's issue over the weekend I noticed two refreshingly contemporary deployments of the word shit and variants. In Lauren Collins's profile of the artist Tino Sehgal she reports that, regarding Sehgal's highly conceptual work, "the Harvard art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called bullshit." The very next article is about Kip Litton, a dentist-cum-marathon impostor whose elaborate fakeries, writes Mark Singer, "left one in awe of his gift for just making shit up." Some will see all this as evidence of declining standards, but others—teenagers, mostly, and their admirers—will appreciate the levity. I've just begun the next article in the issue, about the political situation in Burma, which I dearly hope Evan Osnos will be describing as a "shitstorm."
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