Missing chapters

At the Chronicle, Marc Parry tells a story about the past resurfacing. (Via Corey Robin.)

Explore everything

Bradley Garrett, serial trespasser.

Labyrinthitis

I loved Jake Arnott's new novel The House of Rumor. He has done something quite amazing, which is to say he has written a novel with the scope and ambition of a Gravity's Rainbow or an Underworld only it is as funny and delightfully readable as - well, truly I can't think of an example, though it has something in common with William Boyd's Any Human Heart or Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. Very appealing book!

"I am Philip Roth"

Philip Roth's open letter to Wikipedia.

Cross-tabs

In Errol Morris's roundabout inquiry into whether his deceased brother was the co-inventor of email, this paragraph caught my eye:

The funeral was in Brookline, Mass., at the Levine Chapel. I knew that my brother had friends, but he worked unendingly, and I was worried that nobody would be there for the funeral. There was my mother, my step-father, and my two step-brothers and step-sister. And, literally, hundreds of people. It was absolutely filled. People were standing in the back. I had the picture of my brother as isolated. Julia asked me, “How did they all find out?” And I said, “They communicate with each other using computers.”

Confirmed, rumored

Infographic of Columbia University's underground tunnels...

Character defects

At the Independent, Chris Crawford on the Foreign Office ban, in the 80s and 90s, on gay service member.

"Not silence, only publicity could protect us in the west"

At the Guardian, this year's Nobelist in Literature Herta Müller on the file kept on her by the Romanian secret service:

In my file I am two different persons. One is called Cristina, who is an enemy of the state and is being fought. To compromise this Cristina a dummy is produced in the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (Disinformation), with all the ingredients that harm me the most – party faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this dummy. It wasn't just sent after me, it hurried ahead of me. Even though I have, from the beginning and always, written only against the dictatorship, the dummy goes its own way to this day. It has become independent of me. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the dummy leads its ghostly life. For how long yet?

Leaves of grass

Geoffrey Nunberg has an interesting piece at the Chronicle Review on problems with the metadata provided by Google Books (link via Galleycat).

Also: invisible ink!

Vacant residences or animal remains

There is a slightly occult feel to this description in William T. Broad's Science Times piece about Peter Rona's two-mile-deep diving quest:

Dr. Rona has found that P. nodosum thrives in restricted areas of Atlantic seabed. Its only visible feature consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. He has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.

Stopping warlocks

At the LA Times, Ed Park asks Lev Grossman how he came to write his new novel The Magicians.

Also: the genesis of Charlie Williams' Stairway to Hell! (Worth going and reading if you have a fondness for secret histories, even if you do not plan to read the novel - though you should!)

@s

At the LRB, Daniel Soar contemplates the arobase:

The new global battle for ownership of @ is in a way heartening: the old orthodoxy had it that it was merely a ligature used for accounting purposes. It was a combination of the letters ‘e’ and ‘a’ to designate ‘ea(ch)’, or of ‘a’ and ‘d’ for the Latin ad: ‘at’ or ‘to’ or something of equally diabolical simplicity. Either way, it had an aura of empire, whether derived from Britain or Rome. It was certainly in accounting for stuff that it made its way into the 20th century: it appeared as a key on the 1902 Lambert typewriter, made in New York, and it was as shorthand for pricing items – 60 widgets @ $2 = $120 – that it subsisted until 1971, when Ray Tomlinson of arpanet invented email. And now, of course, it’s ubiquitous. No one would know where anything was meant to go if it wasn’t for the amazing @.

Tomlinson, when interviewed on the subject, claimed that he simply needed a handy symbol to separate the user (‘nixon’) from the domain they resided at (‘whitehouse.gov’). He also said: ‘I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to another. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them.’ This insouciance – or evasiveness? – is clearly suspicious. What was he trying to say?