Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story – Georg Steller & the Russian Exploration of AK by Corey Ford The Steller’s jay, common to the western American coast from southcentral Alaska to Central America, is a relation of the eastern blue jay, common to central and east coastal America. The Steller’s jay is…
“For nearly all of history, people’s lives have been governed primarily by ignorance,” writes Dr. Gawande. But sometime over the last several decades–and it is only over the last several decades–science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance. In particular, the practice of medicine and especially surgery has…
Murder and Mendelssohn by Kerry Greenwood Greenwood’s twentieth Phryne Fisher novel, and I think her best yet. DI Jack Robinson brings Phryne the case file of a conductor who has, apparently, been suffocated by someone stuffing most of the score of a Mendelssohn oratorio down his throat. Either it’s murder or a really pissed off…
Read more Either it’s murder or a really pissed off music critic.
The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb Very well written look at modern Vietnamese history told through the life of one man in Hanoi, introduced in the first line Old Man Hu’ng makes the best phở in the city and has done so for decades. He did from the shop left to him by…
Country Editor by Henry Beetle Hough Henry Beetle Hough (pronounced huff, it says in his NYT obituary) was legendary among journalists, or at least those of a certain age. He won a special Pulitzer when he was 22 for a paper he cowrote at Columbia University, and in 1920 moved with his wife to Martha’s…
Read more The very evocation of small town life between the wars
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield The most I can say about fonts is that I can recognize Courier New 12, and now I know why: Because it was the standard font for the IBM Selectric ball, the Selectric being the typewriter I learned on in high school. (Mrs. Brown. Boy…
Here, Bullet by Brian Turner A series of poems about the author’s experiences as a soldier in Iraq, which together sum up the price of war and this war in particular. ‘In the Leupold Scope,’ where the narrator is looking through a spotting scope at a woman hanging laundry She is dressing the dead The…
If I Should Die by Matthew Frank One of my favorite reads of 2014. Joseph Stark serves in the Territorial Army in the sandboxes of both Iraq and Afganistan and returns home wounded (and how is in itself is a long, slow and positively delicious reveal). Honorably discharged as physically unfit for duty, he becomes…
The bank is a condition of tilted wings, and the turn is the change in the direction which results. The connection between the two is inexorable: The airplane must bank to turn, and when it is banked it must turn...The miraculous part of the maneuver is that the turn has an important balancing effect on the bank that causes it. The same effect, in cruder form, steadies cars on banked roadways, and bobsleds on the vertical walls of icy tracks. The difference in airplanes is that as the bank angle increases, the turn also quickens and by doing so automatically delivers a balance that is perfect. Bicycles react similarly: When they start to topple, they turn and thereby keep themselves up. Airplanes are even steadier. They operate in three-dimensional space and do not rely on tires to keep from sliding to the side They will never capsize no matter how steeply they are banked.
# Permanent link to Flying Is Basic Transportation to Alaskans
Uprooted by Naomi Novik Poor Agnieszka, she’s such a klutz, but at least everyone knows that the wizard who lives up the valley won’t choose her for his ten-year tribute. Until he does, and away she goes to live with the Dragon in his tower. The evil Wood is stirring, sending noxious poisons and vicious…