18th November 2011
The Bible of King James
“You don’t have to be a Christian to hear the power of those words—simple in vocabulary, cosmic in scale, stately in their rhythms, deeply emotional in their impact. Most of us might think we have forgotten its words, but the King James Bible has sewn itself into the fabric of the language. If a child is ever the apple of her parents’ eye or an idea seems as old as the hills, if we are at death’s door or at our wits’ end, if we have gone through a baptism of fire or are about to bite the dust, if it seems at times that the blind are leading the blind or we are casting pearls before swine, if you are either buttering someone up or casting the first stone, the King James Bible, whether we know it or not, is speaking through us. The haves and have-nots, heads on plates, thieves in the night, scum of the earth, best until last, sackcloth and ashes, streets paved in gold, and the skin of one’s teeth: All of them have been transmitted to us by the translators who did their magnificent work 400 years ago.
The End of Cheap Coffee
“Between 2006 and 2009, the Colombian yield shrank by a quarter—from 12 million bags to 7.8 million, the lowest yield in 33 years. The forecast doesn’t look good for the rest of the coffee-growing world, either: more pests in East Africa, more hurricanes in Central America, more droughts in Indonesia. Global coffee stockpiles are close to record lows. “There is simply not enough coffee in the world,” Jose Sette, now the former executive director of the International Coffee Organization, told Bloomberg in February. Combine this with other economic realities—the rising cost of fertilizer and the fact that young people, bound for the cities, aren’t following in their parents’ coffee-growing footsteps—and you can understand the term that Peter Baker has coined as a warning: “peak coffee.” Just like with oil, the world is maxing out the volume of coffee it can sustain.
14th November 2011
The Rise and Fall of the Columbia House Record Club
“The allure of the record club was simple: you put almost nothing down, signed a simple piece of paper, picked out some records, and voila! — a stack of vinyl arrived at your doorstep. By 1963, Columbia House was the flagship of the record-club armada, with 24 million records shipped. By 1994, they had shipped more than a billion records, accounted for 15 percent of all CD sales, and had become a $500-million-a-year behemoth that employed thousands at its Terre Haute, Indiana, manufacturing and shipping facility (see sidebar).
Of course, most of the record clubs’ two million customers failed to read the fine print, obligating them to purchase a certain number of monthly selections at exorbitant prices and even more exorbitant shipping costs. At the same time, consumers plotted to sign up multiple accounts under assumed names, in order to keep getting those 12-for-a-penny deals as often as possible. Record clubs may have introduced several generations of America’s youth to the concept of collection agencies — and the concept of stealing music, decades before the advent of the Internet.
9th November 2011
What I Lost in Libya
““Qaddafi soldiers at 300 meters,” a rebel in another car told us. Bullshit, I thought. The four of us looked at each other and shook our heads. We’d seen no such thing, and had frequently gotten faulty intelligence from rebels. We milled about for a while, asking if we could ride with the rebels when they launched a counteroffensive. We moved to the side of the road in case of shelling, which tended to hit the center of the road. That’s when we heard automatic gunfire; the warning was right. I heard Anton shout, “We have to get in a truck!” But the only rebel vehicles in sight were fleeing the scene and we weren’t close enough to get in, so we ran deeper into the desert to take cover in a small copse of trees.
8th November 2011
Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best
“The market for maple syrup offers an odd inversion. The thin, pale fluid labeled Fancy or Grade A Light Amber commands the highest prices. It is the white bread of condiments, an inoffensive accompaniment to more flavorful fare. The robust, thick syrup marked Grade B fairly bursts with maple flavor, but sells at a significant discount. So why does the nominally inferior grade offer decidedly superior flavor? The answer lies in the history of maple syrup, a product that has long served as a symbol of American authenticity. As our sense of American identity has evolved, our syrup labels have not always kept pace.
7th November 2011
Unfrozen
“Shortly after 6 p.m. on a drizzling, dreary November day in 2010, two men dressed in green surgical scrubs opened the door of the Iceman’s chamber in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. They slid the frozen body onto a stainless steel gurney. One of the men was a young scientist named Marco Samadelli. Normally, it was his job to keep the famous Neolithic mummy frozen under the precise conditions that had preserved it for 5,300 years, following an attack that had left the Iceman dead, high on a nearby mountain. On this day, however, Samadelli had raised the temperature in the museum’s tiny laboratory room to 18°C—64°F.
With Samadelli was a local pathologist with a trim mustache named Eduard Egarter Vigl, known informally as the Iceman’s “family doctor.” While Egarter Vigl poked and prodded the body with knowing, sometimes brusque familiarity, a handful of other scientists and doctors gathered around in the cramped space, preparing to do the unthinkable: defrost the Iceman. The next day, in a burst of hurried surgical interventions as urgent as any operation on a living person, they would perform the first full-scale autopsy on the thawed body, hoping to shed new light on the mystery of who the Iceman really was and how he had died such a violent death.
Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize
“The ability to remember motor acts like changing lanes is called procedural memory, and it is a type of implicit memory—meaning that your brain holds knowledge of something that your mind cannot explicitly access. Riding a bike, tying your shoes, typing on a keyboard, and steering your car into a parking space while speaking on your cell phone are examples of this. You execute these actions easily but without knowing the details of how you do it. You would be totally unable to describe the perfectly timed choreography with which your muscles contract and relax as you navigate around other people in a cafeteria while holding a tray, yet you have no trouble doing it. This is the gap between what your brain can do and what you can tap into consciously.
1st November 2011
What a Tangled Web We Weave
“From using euphemisms such as “collateral damage” to faking orgasms, we practise deception all the time. But in order to lie better to others, we must first fool ourselves.
28th October 2011
One Google Books To Rule Them All?
“In 2002, Google began scanning the world’s 130 million or so books in preparation for the “secret ‘books’ project” that eventually became Google Books. In 2004, they began offering access to these scans, displaying the irritatingly-named “snippets” of books in their search results. And in no time at all, they were getting sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers for copyright infringement. These lawsuits, plus two more that were filed subsequently against Google, resulted in a six-year rollercoaster ride that, like all good roller coasters, exhilarated, terrified and rattled all the participants, and ended by thumping their quaking bods to a halt, last March, in very nearly the same place from which they’d started out.
26th October 2011
Inside the Mind of the Octopus
“Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.
