The warm night claimed her. In a moment it was part of her. She walked on the grass, and her shoes were instantly soaked. She flung up her arms to the sky. Power ran to her fingertips. Excitement was communicated from the waiting trees, and the orchard, and the paddock; the intensity of their secret life caught at her and made her run. It was nothing like the excitement of ordinary looking forward, of birthday presents, of Christmas stockings, but the pull of a magnet – her grandfather had shown her once how it worked, little needles springing to the jaws – and now night and the sky above were a vast magnet, and the things that waited below were needles, caught up in the great demand.
—Daphne du Maurier
—from “The Pool”
—found in Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
isthmus /IS-thməs/. noun. A strip of land with water on both sides that connects two relatively larger land areas. In anatomy, a narrow part or organ connecting two larger parts. From Latin isthmus, from Greek isthmos (narrow land between two seas). Further history is unknown, though it could be from eimi (to go) and suffix -thmo (step, movement).
“They journeyed by canoe as far as the Chagres River would take them, then onward by mule. The isthmus, a thin, serpentine twist on the map, became five days’ journey through a stinging, biting fog.” (Alissa York)
“There was of course her figure to be assimilated; and only the most vicious corset, he thought at first, could so constrain the isthmus of her waist.” (Martin Amis)
“She sat on the sand and put her shapely foot in his lap, oblivious to the fact that she was exposing the metallic-gold isthmus of thong bikini between her legs, or that her pumiced heel was pressing down on his groin.” (Tatjana Soli)
Thanks to Reader K. for pointing out this compelling selection of photos of Russia from 100+ years ago. The photo of Tolstoy isn’t even the most interesting! See also: the rest of the more than 2600 photos in the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection at the Library of Congress, a link from last year that leads with one of my favorite century-old color photos and, not quite as ancient but still amazing, Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 (in NYC).
Some fascinating background—and some litt words—in this “analysis of nearly one billion Tweets” that “maps the emergence of new words across the USA in unprecedented detail”.
This is the Surface of a Comet! Thanks, Reader B.
James Somers gets a bit deep in the weeds at times in this piece on reverse engineering Google Docs but the general idea of the “archaeology of writing” is one of the more intriguing in this time of living documents. You might remember Somers as purveyor of one of the greatest pieces of word advice for Mac users ever, featured here a few years ago.
Behold how 19 other U.S. states could be packed into the state of Alaska!
Quite a moving story of a teen who serendipitously rediscovered a book and, through it, her dead mother and herself.
Dollar Street documents the lives of 264 families in 50 countries through more than 30,000 photographs. That’s cool enough, but the sorting by income makes the photos even more interesting.
MSG gets a bad rap. And I’m not the only one who thinks so: An MSG Convert Visits the High Church of Umami.
Multiple people shared the provocatively titled article “One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.” Except the research actually shows no such thing as the article itself clearly shows. Do I really need to spell this out? #DeathToTheDoubleSpace
Today in 1907, author and playwright Daphne de Maurier is born in London to a prominent family of actors and authors. Her most famous work, the novel Rebecca, was an instant best-seller, though initially panned by critics. In addition to being the basis of the Oscar-winning Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, Rebecca was also used as by the Nazis as a code key during World War II and the monstrous housekeeper Mrs. Danvers has infiltrated popular culture.
► Diffusion Choir, a kinetic sculpture that visualizes the organic movements of an invisible flock of Tyvek birds moving in harmony.
POV video of ► Claudio Caluori on the Mont-Sainte-Anne downhill mountain biking course. Looks like a video game.
Reader L.: “I need more lagom in my life.”
Reader B.: "Too bad the Philip K. Dick tv series is weak. ¶ Man, that GQ piece! I have resisted responding so far.
Reader C.: “Book Cell = Amazing”
Another Reader B.: “Roget was cray-cray. See what I did there?”
Reader J.: “That subject, ‘Rusting Sights First and Last’? – I see what you did there.”
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