Reviews and News:
Ta-Nehisi Coates quits Twitter after spat with Cornel West.
A 21st-century Benedictine: “How Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk from Minnesota, came to be hiding in a Timbuktu hotel during a jihadist attack last summer is a story that begins in the fifth century. But the short answer is: he had flown to the medieval center of learning (and site of a United Nations peacekeeping mission since 2013), to start a new archival project—digitizing tens of thousands of documents in the Imam Ben Essayouti Library…Christian monks have helped safeguard cultural patrimony for more than a millennium. As followers of Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-540), Stewart says, Benedictines ultimately became “leaders in the copying and transmission of texts.” In the last 15 years, he has taken that tradition to some of the world’s most volatile regions—Syria, Iraq, Israel, and parts of the Balkans—as well as India, Ukraine, and Russia, to help conserve documents threatened not only by religious wars and geopolitics, but also by poverty, natural disasters, and climate change.”
The Bonfire of the Vanities at 30.
Tolkien’s Christmas letters to his children: “In December 1920 Father Christmas wrote a letter to a modest house in the Oxford suburbs, enclosing a watercolour sketch of his own rather more exotic domed snow house, approached by a flight of steps lit by ice lanterns. ‘I heard you ask Daddy what I was like and where I lived,’ he wrote to three-year-old John Tolkien, and as the family grew to four children, he continued to write every Christmas for 23 years, until the youngest, Priscilla, was 14.”
“Cat Person” author may sign book deal for as much as $1 million.
The Atlantic to return to a paywall: “Mr. Cohn said the decision to launch a paywall wasn’t ‘a desperation move’ for the Atlantic, which he says is on pace to increase its total revenue in 2017 over the previous year. He said that the company has seen growth in its digital advertising, events, consulting and print circulation businesses but declines in its print advertising business. He declined to provide specific figures. The magazine’s leadership wanted to seize upon the increasing enthusiasm among consumers to pay for news and entertainment online, Mr. Cohn said.”
Essay of the Day:
How do you recover people who die climbing Mount Everest? Mostly, you don’t. John Branch writes about two Indian climbers that were:
“Five Sherpas surrounded the frozen corpse. They swung axes at the body’s edges, trying to pry it from its icy tomb. They knocked chunks of snow from the body, and the shattered pieces skittered down the mountain. When they finally freed a leg and lifted it, the entire stiff and contorted body shifted, down to its fingertips.
“The sun was shining, but the air was dangerously cold and thin at 27,300 feet above sea level. A plume of snow clouded the ridge toward the summit of Mount Everest, so close above. When the Sherpas arrived — masks on their faces, oxygen tanks on their backs — the only movement on the steep face came from the dead man’s frayed jacket pockets. They were inside out and flapping in the whipping wind.
“More than a year of exposure to the world’s wickedest elements had blackened and shriveled the man’s bare face and hands. His hydrant-yellow summit suit had dulled to the hue of a fallen leaf. The bottom of his boots pointed uphill. His frozen arms were bent at the elbows and splayed downhill over his head. It was as if the man sat down for a rest, fell backward and froze that way.
“The Sherpas picked at the body and used gestures and muffled words to decide how best to move it off the mountain. The ghoulish face and bone-white teeth scared them, so they covered the head with the jacket’s hood.
“There was no time to linger. That altitude is called the ‘death zone’ for good reason. The Sherpas knew from experience how difficult it was to scale the world’s highest mountain. The only thing more daunting might be to haul a dead body back down.
“The man’s name was Goutam Ghosh, and the last time anyone saw him alive was on the evening of May 21, 2016, when it was obvious that he would become another fatality statistic, soon frozen and as inanimate as the boulders around him.
“Ghosh was a 50-year-old police officer from Kolkata, part of a doomed eight-person expedition — four climbers from the Indian state of West Bengal and four Sherpa guides from Nepal — that ran out of time and oxygen near the top of Everest. The four Bengali climbers were eventually abandoned by their guides and left to die. Three did; only one, a 42-year-old woman named Sunita Hazra, survived, as did the guides.”
Photo: Mars’s spiral
Poem: Max Ritvo, “Dinner in Los Angeles, Raining in July”
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