Reviews and News:
Revisiting Jane Austen’s unfinished novel: “Two hundred years after its author’s death, Sanditon remains a robust, unsparing portrait of human foolishness.”
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A one-man play of C. S. Lewis’s conversion: “McLean’s rendering draws attention to a singularly important feature of Lewis’s story, often neglected by biographers: his experience of war.”
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The Renaissance at home: “Piety…permeated the average home, whether those living in it were super-rich financiers such as the Medici or the Renaissance equivalents of Mrs. May’s just-about-managing class…works we now think of as masterpieces of art originally had a religious purpose.”
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IBM announced it has successfully stored data on a single atom for the first time: “The research, carried out at the computing giant’s Almaden lab in Silicon Valley, was published in the scientific journal Nature March 8, and could have massive implications for the way we’ll store digital information in the future.”
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Rabbit hole leads to 700-year-old Knights Templar cave.
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The Azure Window has collapsed.
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Was Johnny Cash a poet?
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Charles T. Rubin reviews a book that argues we should take “moral enhancement” drugs to help us do the right thing about climate change.
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Essay of the Day:
In Wired, Elizabeth Weil writes about a 752-pound emerald and the shady emerald market:
“Eight years ago the emerald was logged into evidence by detectives Scott Miller and Mark Gayman of the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Bureau. The two men are longtime veterans: 30 years for Miller, 28 for Gayman. They dress as the Hollywood versions of themselves, in wraparound sunglasses, badges dangling off long chains. Among Gayman’s career highlights is the time he busted Joe Pesci’s ex-wife for the hit she put out on her new lover. One thing they both hate is the emerald case. It’s a whack-a-mole of schemers. Detangling all the rackets and lies is, Miller says, ‘a puzzle from hell.’
“Emeralds invite stories—many of them dubious. At various points in history people have believed that emeralds were capable of protecting humans against cholera, infidelity, and evil spirits, and that an emerald placed under the tongue could transform a person into a truth-teller. This 752-pound emerald doesn’t quite fit under the tongue, and it appears to have had zero positive effects. Miller and Gayman got sucked into its orbit on October 8, 2008, when their sergeant forwarded a call. A man with a squeaky voice named Larry Biegler had phoned the cops in a little suburban California town called Temple City, just southeast of Pasadena. He told the officer on duty that his ‘840-pound’ emerald (a lot of people say the emerald weighs 840 pounds, but it doesn’t) had been stolen and that he’d been abducted and released by the Brazilian Mafia. So the detectives climbed into what Miller calls his ‘mobile office’ (a Chevy Blazer), drove 15 miles out to Temple City, and spent the day in the local police station parsing the emerald dossier. The case ‘was fun,’ Miller told me, ‘at the beginning.’
“A thing you should know is that emeralds are complicated. The chemical formula for an emerald is Be3Al2(Si6018). For the green crystals to form, beryllium must be heated to over 750 degrees Fahrenheit, under 7.5 to 21.75 tons of pressure per square inch, in the presence of chromium or vanadium. Given that beryllium exists only in tiny quantities near Earth’s crust, this seldom happens, and even when it does, the resulting crystals, or beryls, as they’re known, are not uniform. Almost all emeralds include cracks and inclusions, aka impurities. On the Mohs scale of hardness, emeralds score 7.5 to 8 out of 10. If you cut along a crack or inclusion, they shatter.
“Diamonds, by contrast, are simple: pure carbon. The chemical formula for a diamond is C. Diamonds score a 10 on the Mohs scale. The trade is controlled by a few large players. There’s also a weekly international price sheet, the Rapaport Diamond Price List, that sets value based on the four c’s: carat, clarity, cut, and color. Diamond price is further stabilized by cartels that determine the quantity of gemstones released to market. Meanwhile, the emerald trade is controlled by hundreds of tiny players. The price is, to put it generously, flexible. An emerald costs what someone will pay. Period. The idea that diamonds are more romantic than emeralds is preposterous, a marketing ploy. Diamonds are a product like gold or crude oil: rational, conservative. Emeralds are Turkish rugs. When you buy one you believe that you’ve found a secret treasure and finagled a good deal. Then—weeks, months, years later—the truth comes out: You’ve been had. Time to grip up and face your wounded ego and foist the emerald upon the next guy.”
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Image of the Day: Storsteinen
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Poem: Malcolm Guite, “A Rondeau for Leonard Cohen”
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