Reviews and News:
The history of Europe is a history of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean: “Simplify – but not, please, in the manner of, say, Liam Fox – your image of Europe. Envisage its elementary geometry as an arrowhead pointing into the ocean from Asia. The Mediterranean and Atlantic mark the edges. Roughly bisecting the angle is a long watershed of highlands and boglands, from which almost all major rivers flow, splitting the continent into two natural economic zones. Strenuously, over millennia of cabotage, trading, colonising and empire-building, each zone took shape as a practical arena of long-range commerce, uniting, in the case of the Mediterranean, coasts and hinterlands from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Levant and the Black Sea, and, along the Atlantic fringe, from the mouth of the Guadalquivir to the innermost recesses of the Baltic. The history of Europe can be written in terms of the efforts to create and ultimately to integrate the two zones. Heroic books by Cyprian Broodbank on the Mediterranean (The Making of the Middle Sea, 2013) and Barry Cunliffe on the Atlantic (Facing the Ocean, 2001) have described the forging of each zone. Cunliffe has now undertaken the daunting but vital job of showing how the two economies interlocked.”
Andrew Ferguson writes about the strange experience of visiting a much-admired author’s home: “I was seeing things I remembered seeing though I’d never seen them. A lifelong immersion in a writer’s work can do that to a reader, especially when the work is as vivid and particular as [E. B.] White’s.”
“Vladimir Nabokov famously demanded that interviewers supply him in advance with written questions to which he would reply in writing, dismissing or bending inquiries with the deftness of a good trial lawyer, indulging or patronizing interviewers as he pleased. Critics deemed him an autocrat imperiously stage-managing his image, as though literary interviews weren’t already understood as a species of theater.” He claimed, however, it was because he was a “wretched speaker”: “The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect — or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
Why truckers love NPR: “Aside from the content, according to Murphy, drivers like NPR for the continuity. They can keep listening to the same programs from state to state. They also like NPR because they’re bored, he said, even if a Klan member is listening to a show about Black Lives Matter or transgender people.”
Thieves bore into cellar from Paris catacombs to steal more 300 bottles of vintage wine worth €250,000.
A guide to the plants of Tolkien’s Middle Earth: “Some of the plants in Tolkien’s world are familiar: chestnuts, oaks and lillies. Others — like ‘Elanor’ or ‘Kingsfoil’ — are invented but are still rooted in sound botanical principles.”
A few days ago, I linked to a story of how Terry Pratchett’s unfinished novels were destroyed at the author’s request by a steamroller. In The Times Literary Supplement, Stuart Kelly asks: Should one always obey the wishes of late authors to destroy unpublished work? His answer: Yes.
A history of tea and how European colonization changed the Western diet.
Essay of the Day:
In Wired, Andy Greenberg writes about a vulnerability in hotel key cards that allowed Aaron Cashatt to break into almost any hotel room in America:
“On a warm Phoenix night five years ago, Aaron Cashatt walked down the red-carpeted hall of the second floor of a Marriott hotel, trying to move casually despite the adrenaline and methamphetamine surging through his bloodstream. Six feet tall with blond, close-cropped hair, he wore a black sports coat and baseball cap and kept his head down so the hat’s brim hid his face from surveillance cameras.
“When he found a quiet stretch of hallway, Cashatt chose a door and knocked. No answer. He pulled out a sunglasses case from his pocket, flipped it open, and removed a small tangle of wires connected to a circuit board and a nine-volt battery. On one end of that loosely assembled gadget was a cord attached to a plug. He looked at the keycard lock on the door in front of him, a metallic box that offered a vertical slot ready to accept a guest’s keycard like a piece of bread into a toaster.
“Cashatt didn’t have a keycard. Instead, he reached underneath the lock on the door until his finger found a small, circular port and inserted the plug of his device. Then he held a frayed wire coming off the board to one end of the battery, completing an electric circuit. Instantly, the lock whirred as its bolt retracted, and a green light flashed above the door handle.
“For a moment, Cashatt stared in shock, almost disbelief. ‘It was like the heavens had opened,’ he’d say of the moment years later.
“Cashatt pushed open the unlocked door, walked into the room, and closed the door behind him. Even in his meth-addled state, he was so taken aback by his success in hacking his way in that he laid down on the room’s king-size bed for perhaps a full minute, his heart racing.
“Then he sat upright and started thinking about what he could steal.
“Bolted to the dresser was an expensive-looking TV, but he didn’t have the tools to remove it. So on an impulse, he grabbed a pile of towels and pillows. Tucking them under his arm, he quickly walked out the door, down the stairwell, out a side exit to the red Mitsubishi Galant he’d parked outside, and drove away.
“That spontaneous laundry heist was, in fact, the modest beginning of an epic crime spree. Over the next year, Cashatt exploited an obscure software bug in one ultra-common model of hotel keycard lock to break into hotel after hotel in what would become an unprecedented, all-he-could-eat buffet of serial digital thievery. He’d escalate from stealing TVs to targeting guests’ luggage and walking out with all the possessions he could find. His intrusions would stretch from Arizona to Ohio to Tennessee as he worked to stay ahead of law enforcement. And he’d amass, by some estimates, close to half a million dollars’ worth of stolen goods.”
Video: World Belly Flop Championships
Poem: Edmond Conti, “Avoiding the Optimist”
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