"Nuclear is the answer"

Euan Ferguson has a good Observer piece about James Lovelock, who at age 90 is booked on the inaugural flight of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic...

Almond Ladybits

Katy Guest interviews A. L. Kennedy for the Independent. I have to get that book, even though I do not usually read short stories...

(NB Sherman Alexie had a really extraordinary piece in the New Yorker last week - well worth reading...)

The road of excess

Diana Athill's father simply could not face brown envelopes.

Also: a slightly facile but still thought-provoking piece by Adam Phillips on excess and balance (one day I will write an essay on William Blake, who is surely the prime expert on this question).

Wing-whirring

At the FT, Ángel Gurría-Quintana on a dragonfly safari (FT site registration required):

Our dragonfly safari is coming to an unsatisfactory end when a flying critter buzzes out of the reeds and into sight, before flying away and back again. It’s the biggest dragonfly I’ve ever seen – perhaps the length of my hand-span. It hovers tantalisingly close, suspended in mid-air, then shoots vertically up into the trees, flies around them and returns. It darts at me, stops a few inches from my face, and then reverses. It seems to be examining me, taunting me. If this were a larger animal, I’d feel very threatened.

“A Southern Hawker,” Curry says, a note of excitement in his voice, “and it’s showing classic behaviour.” The British Dragonfly Society’s webpage describes the Southern Hawker as an “inquisitive” species, most often seen individually, which “may fly quite close to investigate observers”. This extraordinary display goes on for a few minutes, until – contrary to our expectations – it lands on some nearby reeds. “It’s posing for us,” says Curry.

We are now able to appreciate its characteristic paired yellow spots. It is a male, as is apparent from its slightly constricted abdomen and the claspers on the tip of its tail, which it uses to attach itself to females. We approach cautiously. Its wings shudder, shimmering in the weak sunlight. “That’s called wing-whirring,” says Curry. “It’s warming up its wing muscles in case it needs to take off suddenly.”

I am fascinated by the dragonflies’ flight control mechanisms. They have eight abdominal muscles, Curry explains, which they use to move each of their four wings independently. They can fly in ways that are inconceivable for any other animal. Southern Hawkers can fly for as long as an hour without resting. Ours gives a final whirr, and shoots off.

Also worth noting: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney on the vinyl countdown; lunch with Jared Diamond.

"She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks"

At Slate, Robert Pinsky on Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount, on Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation."

Portrait of the cat by a young artist

Courtesy of Oscar:

What the original has been up to recently:

Baggage

Three blissful weeks await in Tropical Island Paradise!

Trick memory

Luc Sante on the Thirteen Most Wanted.

"Love and bacon"

A fascinating piece at the Washington Post about the sign-offs people choose for their e-mails. (Via Marginal Revolution.)

(I was tempted at an earlier point in life to write a scholarly article about subscription styles and veiled hostility in eighteenth-century letters - James Boswell's political correspondence and the give-me-a-loan letters of William Godwin as prime evidence of the co-dependency of menace and flattery!)

Also: Twitter(o)graphy (Ben Schott provides 19th-century telegraph abbreviations - thanks to Tarvo for the link).

When worlds collide

This video combines two of my favorite things - libraries and the Vibram Five Fingers "toe shoes"! (Link courtesy of my father.)

The Friends of the Collingswood Library are sponsoring a 5K race on Saturday, September 26 as a fundraiser for the library - if I were not already registered for the Little Red Lighthouse swim the same day, I would be very tempted to sign up!

"Wet documents, moldy paper, insect and vermin residue, and other unpleasant things"

Radioactive lab notebooks! (Courtesy of Brent, who got it here.)

At schools like Princeton and Columbia, one is really on the spot for this Manhattan Project history, it's pretty amazing. I would love to go sometime and see the sites in New Mexico. My friend N. (I may have this story slightly wrong!) was subletting an apartment down the street from the widow of this physicist, for instance, and one day archivists turned up to plumb the apartment's contents for the papers of Kitty Oppenheimer...

Yesterday I sent out the manuscript of my own novel of adventures in radioisotope research, set in an alternate-universe version of Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics (a.k.a. the sequel to The Explosionist). I'll do one more pass through the manuscript in September, and of course then there will be copy-editing and proofing - but still, it's huge to be done. New provisional title, already announced on Facebook: Invisible Things!

Profiling

Darryl Pinckney has an interesting piece in the Independent on Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and his arrest.

[ED. The article incorrectly suggests that the caller mentioned the race of the two men on the porch; here's a Globe story that describes the content of the 911 call more accurately and explains that the police report doesn't distinguish between the caller's words and the summary produced by the officer on the scene. Copious further comment via Google, and thanks to Brent for the correction.]

"She said I was skeletal and scary eyed"

Rachel Cooke has a morally lowering but grippingly readable profile of Liz Jones in the Observer.

Love bugs

Paul Collins contemplates awful library books.

Transfigurations

I have to get Martin Stannard's Muriel Spark biography:

Her own bodily transfiguration was less spiritual than Christ’s, but as striking in its way. It was brought about, Stannard tells us, with the aid of manicures, waxes, perms, designer dresses, perfume and jewellery, and the result was a “mythological” being, the personification of glamour. One acquaintance recalls a vision of white fox furs and diamonds shimmering up to him at a party, and realising only later that it was Spark. She had an entourage of young men with whom she liked to be seen. They were never sexual partners, Stannard testifies, but “delightful accessories”, like her Cartier diamond wristwatch, or the Manhattan apartment that she bought but never used, or her racehorse, Lifeboat.