DR. GARBAGE.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 13-NOV-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

There is a saying among the rank-and-file members of the Department of Sanitation, otherwise known as san men, or New York's Strongest: "You can go your whole life without ever having to call a fireman, and if you're lucky you'll never have to call a cop, but you want to see a sanitation worker every day." Robin Nagle, the director of N.Y.U.'s Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought, cited this adage the other day in the course of explaining her new gig as the D.S.N.Y.'s official anthropologist-in-residence, a role that seems to involve at least as much cheerleading as it does scholarship. "If every anthropologist in the country...

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