Reviews and News:
Fueled by demand from gulf states, Italian marble is booming. Visit the majestic marble quarries of northern Italy. “In Italy’s most marble-rich area, known as the Apuan Alps, the abundance is surreal. Sit on a beach in one of the nearby towns (Forte dei Marmi, Viareggio), and you appear to be looking up at snow-covered peaks. But it is snow that does not melt, that is not seasonal. Michelangelo sculpted most of his statues from this stone, and he was so obsessed with the region that he used to fantasize about carving an entire white mountain right where it stood.”
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Evelyn Waugh, illustrator and collagist: “Antiquarian bookseller, Maggs Bros, is celebrating the recent opening of its new home in Bedford Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury, with an exhibition of artworks by Evelyn Waugh.
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Nelson Mandela book withdrawn after widow threatens to sue.
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Warhol artwork found rolled up in a tube in Alice Cooper’s storage locker.
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A history of psychedelic drugs.
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For richer or poorer…but mostly richer: “The problem with the progressive approach to poverty is that it denies the importance of culture and character to household prosperity—especially when it comes to marriage. This isn’t to say that a tough job market and bad public policy are irrelevant to explaining why some millennials are in poverty, but life choices substantially affect the odds of ending up poor.”
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An “elegant” and “clarifying” account of the life of Ernest Hemingway.
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What American Christians worry about most.
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Essay of the Day:
The Tarahumara of northern Mexico are famous for their ability to run extremely long distances. Now some of them run for Mexican cartels. Ryan Goldberg tells the story in Texas Monthly:
“It was a half hour after midnight and Silvino Cubesare Quimare was approaching the ghost town of Separ, in southwest New Mexico. Tall and lithe, his skin browned from years of laboring under the desert sun, he strode through the darkness. Strapped to his back were two homespun burlap packs, one filled with 45 pounds of marijuana bricks and the other with enough burritos and gallon jugs of water to survive another week in the wilderness. With him were five cousins and a nephew, each shouldering a similar load. They trudged silently past the scars of an old copper mining trail, long-gone railroad tracks and trading posts that once upon a time exchanged men, minerals, and equipment across the border to Chihuahua. Up ahead, they saw the lights of a highway and knew they were within a dozen miles of their drop-off. They’d reach it before daybreak.
“It was April 2, 2010, and over five days they had traveled roughly five hundred miles from their village of Huisuchi, in the remote Sierra Madre mountains of northern Mexico. For months, Huisuchi had been cursed with drought. Though clouds had gathered off and on over the villagers’ homes—dark, billowing masses that overshadowed their huts among the fields of corn—it had not rained. The villagers had danced, and their children had tossed handfuls of water toward the sky, asking their god Onorúame for help, but relief had not come. By early spring their corn was burned on the stalk. Rather than face starvation, Silvino’s cousins had approached him with an idea: they could go on a drug-running mission across the border. It was a quick-paying job, and it would help their village. ‘You’re strong and you know the way,’ they pleaded. ‘You’ve done this before.’”
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“The tribe’s runners had never ventured far from home and remained largely unknown until 1993, when an opportunistic American photographer named Rick Fisher brought several members, including a 55-year-old grandfather and a 40-something goat farmer, to an old Colorado mining town called Leadville to enter its 100-mile ultramarathon. The race was part of the budding sport of extreme long-distance trail running, in which race lengths range from slightly longer than the standard 26.2-mile marathon to more than 150 miles. Wearing sandals and swigging beers at the final aid station before the finish, the Tarahumara runners captured first, second, and fifth place and left behind hundreds of mesmerized competitors and fans.
“Fisher struck deals with sponsors; he paid his runners with bags of corn and beans. When he returned with seven new competitors in 1994, they dominated the race again. The American ultramarathoner Micah True got to know some of the Tarahumara runners in Leadville, and he was so changed by the experience that he later moved to the Sierra Madre. But by the time he arrived, what he found was troubling: because of years of drought, famine, and encroaching cartel violence, in some areas the tribe’s running traditions were almost entirely dormant. Meanwhile, as ultramarathons surged in popularity, American runners began crushing previously held records. True wondered how they would fare against the Tarahumara, and he sought to revitalize these local traditions. In 2006, he persuaded Scott Jurek, the top American, to travel to Urique Canyon for a trail race he was organizing that is now known as the Ultra Caballo Blanco. He enticed locals to enter by promising food vouchers to anyone who finished. He also enlisted the two best Tarahumara runners: Silvino, who was 28 at the time, and his younger cousin Arnulfo Quimare Qui.”
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Photo: Ball drone activated in the International Space Station
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Poem: Hailey Leithauser, “Lacrimarium”
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