As most of you know, John McCain passed away on Saturday. Back in 1999, Andrew Ferguson wrote about McCain’s favorite poet, Robert Service, and how a crew from Comedy Central tried to trip him up: “Who’s your favorite poet? they asked McCain. According to the cosmology of the sophisticates at Comedy Central, politicians are not supposed to have favorite poets. McCain hesitated, and then said, ‘Robert Service, I guess.’ Okay, the comedians pressed as the cameras rolled, then recite some of his poetry. Gotcha? Here again, the Comedy Central team revealed their own provincialism. They were apparently ignorant of one of the ironclad rules of modern poetry: Anyone who likes Robert Service can recite Robert Service. By the yard.” Here is McCain talking to Elisa New about how he learned Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” May he rest in peace.
The evolution of Ross MacDonald: How a family crisis and three novels changed the course of crime fiction.
Delacroix is remembered for his paintings, but his drawings, Eric Gibson argues, were just as revolutionary.
The 101-year-old playwright and novelist, A.E. Hotchner, has published another book: “Hotchner, the man who was everybody’s best friend—Ernest Hemingway’s, anyway, and Paul Newman’s—wrote his latest book in longhand. He did not let his wife, Virginia Kiser, read the manuscript as he went along. She would peek over his shoulder, or try to. He would cover the words with his other hand. She said, from across the room.”
Perfectly-preserved ancient foal shown for the first time.
Can China’s $180-million telescope, FAST, coexist with a local tourist attraction a few miles away? “China spent $180 million to create the telescope, which officials have repeatedly said will make the country the global leader in radio astronomy. But the local government also spent several times that on this nearby Astronomy Town—hotels, housing, a vineyard, a museum, a playground, classy restaurants, all those themed light fixtures. The government hopes that promoting their scope in this way will encourage tourists and new residents to gravitate to the historically poor Guizhou province. It is, in some sense, an experiment into whether this type of science and economic development can coexist. Which is strange, because normally, they purposefully don’t. The point of radio telescopes is to sense radio waves from space—gas clouds, galaxies, quasars. By the time those celestial objects’ emissions reach Earth, they’ve dimmed to near-nothingness, so astronomers build these gigantic dishes to pick up the faint signals. But their size makes them particularly sensitive to all radio waves, including those from cell phones, satellites, radar systems, spark plugs, microwaves, Wi-Fi, short circuits, and basically anything else that uses electricity or communicates. Protection against radio-frequency interference, or RFI, is why scientists put their radio telescopes in remote locations: the mountains of West Virginia, the deserts of Chile, the way-outback of Australia.”
The playwright Neil Simon has died. He was 91.
Essay of the Day:
In Atlas Obscura, Travis McDade writes about book thieves Robert Kindred and Richard Green, who stole thousands of rare prints from university libraries in the summer of 1980:
“In the summer of 1980, Robert Kindred was a 35-year-old high school dropout with no plans of going to college. Despite that, scattered in the backseat of his newly leased Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham were half a dozen guides to American college and university locations, each representing a region of the United States. He also had a single volume covering the entire country in his briefcase. A former Boy Scout, he liked to be prepared.
“No major American crime requires as much travelling as that of stealing rare books from libraries, a fact Kindred knew from experience. Thanks to wealthy Americans, poor Europeans, two hot wars, and one cold one, the fruits of 500 years of printing came to be scattered across the United States in the second half of the 20th century. And almost all of it could be found on the shelves of some college or university library.”
Photo: Eagle
Poem: Paul J. Willis, “Wild Strawberry”
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