And the award for best headline writing of the year goes to The New York Times!

The Virginia Quarterly Review, in an interesting experiment, commissioned a moment-by-moment recounting of the Mumbai terrorist attack one year ago. It’s available online in four parts, and weighs in at just over 20,000 words total.

The LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy, provides more information on the writing of the piece. They note - and I’d agree - that “the piece isn’t perfect… The bigger issues — of conflict in the region, of the violence a small, determined group can inflict, of how a fervid militia could be better armed and trained than the police they challenged, of the failures of intelligence, of what a major attack on Mumbai means — are squeezed into the margins, even as the moment-by-moment account provides an excellent understanding of the attacks themselves.”

There’s some commentary on the missteps by the Indian authorities - like the 10 hours it took for commandos to reach the site of the attacks, having to wait for orders and even transportation into the city. But by virtue of strictly limiting the account to the attacks themselves, it’s hard to come to a larger understanding of what exactly the attacks meant - as an international media event, another India-Pakistan incident, etc. There is a stab at backing up and giving you the bigger context at the end, but it’s more of a coda than an actual analysis that informs the rest of the storytelling. The VQR’s hunger for particular detail - an idealized version of lyrical realism applied to non-fictive reporting - means that we see plenty of trees but very little of the forest.

The piece succeeds as a well-crafted work that communicates the blunt experience of the event and provides the foundation for critical analysis to follow. But if you’re wanting more than a parenthetical big picture, I’d look elsewhere - like the excellent book Columbine that provides both a moment-by-moment account of events and the understanding of what it meant.

K2’s east face, as photographed during a 1909 expedition by Italian Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi. After trying to climb the southeast spur and halting at about 20,500 feet up, Amedeo famously claimed that the mountain would never be climbed.

It wasn’t… until 1954.

littlepotato:

slime mold (via myriorama)

Slime molds are the craziest things: forming complex structures, moving around - even driving a robot!

English Russia has a ton of pictures, including an animated gif at the end. Youtube doesn’t have any cool slime mold videos, sadly.

There are occasions when I have a glimmer of doubt that the internet contains everything, when I briefly imagine something that seems too awesome for ones and zeroes. Then I rush to my computer, quickly open my browser, and frantically type into the Google search bar only to discover…

… that my faith was well-founded.

After two decades of empirically-demonstrated indifference (and a few years of baby-noises before that), I recently became interested in finding out about the American Civil War for the first time. Not knowing much, I tried several routes in: Team of Rivals, This Republic of Suffering, and even admiring the Pulitzer and heft of Battle Cry of Freedom. Nothing really worked - although This Republic of Suffering is damn interesting for its own reasons, but not in a way that extends to the war as a whole. But finally, I have breached the barricade.

This Mighty Scourge might be the best book ever if you find yourself saying things like “I kinda like reading books and vaguely know stuff about the Civil War but would like someone to sit down to me and explain it like they’re talking to an adult, not someone who needs explaining in little words and exciting language to keep from losing their - oh hey Tumblr updated!” Saying things like that in your head. Not out loud. Unless you’re mumbling to yourself while writing a post, in which case go right ahead.

But if you do seriously find yourself wanting some answers to the big questions of the war, go ahead and read this. It’s a collection of amazingly neat essays on things like: Why was the Civil War fought anyways? Was Sherman really an asshole like South Carolina says, or did he actually help bring the civil to the Civil War? What’s up with those rumors about Grant being drunk? If it really was about slavery, why does Grandpa insist otherwise? Can you tell me about how amazingly pivotal it was that foreign governments recognize the Confederacy, and how close the Confederacy got to achieving that goal?

It has all those answers and more! And this Thanksgiving week, as I flew two legs each way to and from KC to see the parents, I was very thankful that this book was awesome. And only 220 pages, so I could finish it and feel accomplishment and stuff in the midst of an largely-lethargic endeavor.

Collected by the awesome Rex Sorgatz, who will be updating with links to lists as they’re published (like the just-out NY Times list of best 100 books). They’re good sources for Christmas presents and the like.

(see also: the “Best X of the decade” lists from The Onion A/V Club. Books, music, TV shows - you name it.)

Their “Black Friday” sale runs now through 11/30, apparently. Picked up about a half-dozen albums myself.

The second leg of my flight Monday was from Chicago O’Hare to Kansas City International. In the second busiest airport in the world, I managed to see not one but two separate students from the high school I work at; one was getting his shoes shined, while another wandered by me and a co-worker as we ate McDonalds.

The three-hour layover quickly went by (as I caught up with friends on the phone for most of it), and I was quickly on my next plane headed home. O’Hare is big enough that getting from our gate to the runway necessitated about ten minutes of taxiing on the ground. As we drove by another terminal, I heard a kid yelp from several rows ahead:

“Daddy, is that Kansas City?!”

A murmured response.

“What’s Chicago?!”