Giraffe Edition 48
The World’s Most Dangerous Room
Hannah Beech | Time | 21st August 2014
Three years after the tsunami hit, the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima is barely contained. "So much radiation still pulses inside the crippled reactor cores that no one has been able to get close enough to survey the full extent of the destruction." What lessons has Japan learned? Not enough. “No one has gone to jail, and no one wants to take responsibility. Everyone still wants to look the other way” (3,200 words)
What Lies Beneath Stonehenge?
Ed Caesar | Smithsonian | 21st August 2014
Survey of land around Stonehenge produces "astonishing" results. The stone circle is surrounded by at least 15 previously unknown or poorly understood late Neolithic monuments: henges, barrows, segmented ditches, pits. These "suggest a scale of activity around Stonehenge far beyond what was previously suspected". They reinforce the theory that the site was designed for rites associated with the sun (3,175 words)
Covering The Cops
Calvin Trillin | New Yorker | 17th February 1986
Classic profile of Edna Buchanan, later a celebrated crime novelist, in her days as crime reporter for the Miami Herald. She "dresses every morning to the sound of the police scanner". When she started in 1973 "a murder was an occasion". Now Miami has America's highest murder rate. "A police reporter could drive to work in the morning knowing that there would almost certainly be at least one murder to write about" (7,830 words)
Healthy Words
Alec Ash | London Review Of Books | 20th August 2014
Science fiction gives young Chinese writers a means to make veiled critiques of the government, much as analogies drawn from history were used by older generations of writers. Environmental crises and social engineering are popular themes. Much of this new work is not published officially within China, especially when censors recognise the allusions, but persistent readers can find it freely online (682 words)
Why It’s So Hard To Catch Your Own Typos
Nick Stockton | Wired | 12th August 2014
The logic is simple, obvious and comforting. "When we’re proof reading our own work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it’s easier for us to miss when parts (or all) of it are absent. The reason we don’t see our own typos is because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that exists in our heads". The remedy: Read it again, backwards (920 words)
Video of the day: Freefly Tero
What to expect: New York street scenes shot with a high-speed robot camera rig
Thought for the day
"If you’ve got a 160 IQ, sell 30 points to somebody else because you won’t need it in investing"
— Warren Buffett