“Lindgren was speaking to 70 students at Columbia Journalism School’s storied Pulitzer World Room, after he’d been introduced by journalism professor Victor Navasky, who himself had served as editor of The New York Times Magazine in the 1970s. Navasky told the students the early “New Journalism” practitioner John Hersey was Lindgren’s personal hero and asked who there knew about Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker story ‘Hiroshima.’ One student raised her hand.”

“Hackers, concealed behind fanciful aliases on the Internet, often appropriate larger-than-life dimensions. In reality, other than in physical proportions, Sabu seemed considerably smaller than life. A defensive-lineman-size man known as Booby, he was raising the two young children of his imprisoned aunt in a public housing project. Court documents showed that Mr. Monsegur, 28, paid bills with stolen credit cards and dabbled in drug sales.”
 — Do You think Richard Price has called Willam Gibson and asked him to collaborate on a slightly fictionalized version of the story of Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. “Sabu,” yet?

Those residents of Britain who are somehow able to avoid being stabbed to death will instead be eaten by foxes, who are “taking over” that benighted island.

Here’s the planet earth, getting straight up crazy in the midst of the current magnetic storm due to CORONAL MASS EJECTION. “Kp-indices of 5 or greater indicate storm-level geomagnetic activity. Geomagnetic storms have been associated with satellite surface charging and increased atmospheric drag.” QUICK, CHECK ALL THE MAGNETS IN THE HOUSE. (via)

“Espresso or double-shot, latte or macchiato, cappuccino or capriccino? When ordering a simple coffee in the country where they make it best, you already face a surprisingly vast array of choices. Now, there is another, unusual option: it’s called a capriccino, a new warm coffee beverage made with steamed goat’s milk (“capra” is goat in Italian) aimed at the needs — and desires — of an increasing lactose-intolerant population.”

One week after his former bandmate Lou Reed turned 70, the great John Cale reaches that same pinnacle. As is the case with Reed, there is too much Cale to choose from. (And I’m certainly not going to go with his cover of “Hallelujah,” because enough with anyone apart from Leonard Cohen singing that song.) Anyway, here’s one from his collaboration with Brian Eno. And, as a bonus below, a track with Hector Zazou and Suzanne Vega that somehow always calms and happifies. Many happy returns.

Genius: a fake Instapaper bookmarklet so you can click it and not save anything to read later. (via)

Chris Hughes, who has a lot of money, has bought a “majority share” of The New Republic, which has been sitting rather sadly on the auction block, getting hotter and more spoiled, like a cube of bloody meat on a stump in a dusty town square. Who will buy this delicious, if exceedingly tiny, piece of meat that has been sitting in the sun for days now? It comes with a long and storied and difficult and often ugly history!

Hughes will! And now he has taken the title of “Editor and Publisher” of TNR, whose mindshare was stolen by The Atlantic, Talking Points Memo, and Slate, Salon and probably Thought Catalog. Okay, buddy. I like you. First step. Renounce at least one of those two titles.

I know that rich people get whatever they want, and no one tells them no, but you’re 28, you have never been an editor or a publisher, and also those are two jobs that are in opposition to each other. Sure, you told Richard Just that he was still really in charge of editorial, but you’re undermining him already and this already looks like he’ll be fired by, hmm, I’ll say August, because you move kinda slowly. (And there’s already an executive editor, too. Also there was already a publisher at TNR? One with 86 Twitter followers.) The editor represents the editorial interests; the publisher represents the business interests. Oftentimes the editor and publisher hold hands and walk in the town square, looking at all the other fun pieces of meat, but more often it’s argument and pushing and pulling and sometimes some wig-snatching. Don’t do this. (Also the editor-in-chief and publisher usually live in the same city as the publication?)

Isn’t, like, “owner” good enough anyway?

Okay, and: just don’t talk to the press at all until 2013. Be quiet and do things. It works. And don’t talk about magazines and iPads too much, it’s a dicey subject. Plus, let’s be honest, Jumo was kind of a hot mess tech- and success-wise, and you barely got out of that one intact, though, “selling” it to Good was the best possible resolution to that, so, yay.

Also try not to talk about the “hostile” landscape of the web for long-form journalism any more, too: it’s a long-disproven lie, as plenty of us know, and you’re going to sink some money into this puppy and that’s all good, we appreciate it, and most everyone will be quiet for a while while you work on turnaround and bringing the publication out of the 1940s. (Not coincidentally, probably the decade in which most subscribers were born, God bless them.)

Hmm, what else? Right: also, remember to have a good time!

One of the great things about geography is that it sneaks into just about everything, including books. After all, everything happens somewhere, right? When it comes to describing places, though some books stand out because they find particularly unexpected and fascinating ways to describe how the world fits together. Here I’ve collected eight favorites. Some are more obvious choices than others, but all would fit neatly on the bookshelf of anyone with a flair for the geographic.

1. The Book of Where: Or How To Be Naturally Geographic by Neill Bell

I must have been about seven when this book first came into my possession. My mom, sister and I took a lot of car trips back then, and while I usually posit my place as Trip Navigator as piquing my interest in cartography, I also owe a great debt to this book, which accompanied me on almost every one of those trips.

It’s a kid’s book of course, designed to explain spatial reasoning. The focus starts out local, at the reader’s home, and then graduates up through town, state, country, continent and globe. Along the way, the author covers a range of geographic concepts, including street numbering systems, time zones, reading maps, border disputes, latitude & longitude, and incredibly, given that it was published in 1982, an introductory discussion of global warming. All these concepts are explained in a way that makes them easily tangible, and each chapter questions (which is not to say a test) designed for the naturally curious. It sounds dry, I know, but you’ll have to trust me, it’s not. I must have read it roughly 400 times as a kid. Thinking of it recently, I bought a copy online and it remains just as relevant and great a read. I’m shocked that it’s out of print; here’s hoping it goes back into print around the time my friends have seven year olds. You can buy a copy on Amazon for ONE CENT. ONE CENT (+shipping) for a solid foundation of geographic knowledge! Bargain.

Sample Good Bit: This dedication, which reads “This book is dedicated to all those brave adventurers who step from the familiar into the unknown — from the edge of the continent or from a front porch.”

2. The Control of Nature by John McPhee

Geography, as a field, is divided into two halves: the Human and the Physical. Human geography examines cultures and communities, with an emphasis on place. Physical geography confines itself mostly to earth and earth things. In The Control Of Nature John McPhee chronicles three different places in the world where human and physical geography have disastrously intersected: In Los Angeles, where engineering efforts must protect against landslides; in Heimay, Iceland, where the citizenry are faced with the eruption of a nearby volcano; and in the Mississippi Delta, the astonishing decades-pre-Katrina struggle against the river’s coursing and flooding. Though McPhee’s writing on nature and geology is justly revered, these three pieces (originally published in The New Yorker) stand out as a master trio.

Sample Good Bit: “In an imaginative, life-loving city, there will always be people with a need to fire antique weapons. On July 24, 1977, a marksman on the Middle Fork rammed Kleenex down his barrel instead of cloth wadding. Under the Kleenex was black powder. In black powder there is more of an incendiary risk than there is in the smokeless kind. When the rifle fired, flaming Kleenex shot out the muzzle and burned down three thousand eight hundred and sixty acres, including the entire watershed of the Middle Fork.”

3. The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky

To steal a line from Calvino, this one falls under the category of “Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.” I first picked this book up while stuck on an unexpectedly long layover at the Pittsburgh airport, and it was a revelation. Before I read this book — I later came to realize — I had no consistent mental timeline for human history. Because everything I had learned in school I had learned in discrete sections: US history was separate from European history which was separate from “World” history, and I had no real idea of how the events I learned about in each of these classes interrelated with one another. But in this history, the Basques, who have maintained a stable society in the same place of the world, Euskadi, since before the Roman Empire, become the continuous line through which to view and analyze the events of Western history, as Kurlansky does a phenomenal job plotting the parallels between changes in Basque culture with what was going on elsewhere in the world. For me, the book was a whole new vantage from which to look at history. By the time my plane landed in Seattle, I had finished the book and I proceeded to spend the entire weekend boring the pants off my companion with excitable blathering about this little book as an Ideal Narrative of Human Geography. It is also, by far, the most-loaned book in my personal library. Not coincidentally, I’ve re-bought the book at least four separate times. Kurlansky is my favorite single-subject history writer. If Basques don’t interest you, perhaps his books on cod, salt, oysters, the year 1968, and/or American regional cuisine in the late thirties may.

Sample Good Bit: From a section on the Basques and Greater Spain after the fall of Napoleon: “The preamble to their 1812 constitution paid tribute to the Fueros, but the body of the document dismantled them. Francisco Espoz y Mina, the former commander of the División de Navarra, one of the great heroes of the war, took a copy of the constitution, placed it on a chair, and ordered it shot.”

4. The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

We are all familiar, I presume, with the fact that cholera was cured by a map? I mean, not directly, but the discovery of the cause happened on a map drawn by Dr. John Snow, a map showing the cluster of cholera cases surrounding a water pump. The map was made in 1854, at a time when Victorian London was suffering an epidemic of cholera cases. In Ghost Map, Johnson traces the epidemic through the lives of a handful, including the outbreak’s patient zero as well as the medical folks who were convinced that cholera was spread by miasma, that is by breathing foul air. It’s an utterly fascinating chapter of Human Geography history, but a word of warning: You are going to drink so much water while reading this book. You are going to drink so much water.

Sample Good Bit: “When Prince Albert first announced his idea for a Great Exhibition, his speech included these utopian lines: “We are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great era to which, indeed, all history points: the realisation of the unity of mankind.” Mankind was no doubt becoming more unified, but the results were often far from wonderful. The sanitary conditions of Delhi could directly affect the conditions of London and Paris. It wasn’t just mankind that was becoming unified; it was also mankind’s small intestine.”

5. A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia & Lee McAlester

There is a meme image that surfaces from time to time taken from a book called Identifying Wood. It’s the book’s cover, and it shows a man scrutinizing a block of wood through a loupe. The title of our selection here is similarly amusing as you can imagine the identification process for American Houses going something like this, “Is it a house? Are we in America? Congratulations! You’ve spotted an American House!”

But just as with birdwatching, for which you might need the help of a guide to tell a bullfinch from a chaffinch, this field guide will help you tell a Mission-style home from a Spanish Eclectic. Encompassing the history of home construction and architectural influences from Boston to San Francisco, it also includes a million drawings and photographs of gorgeous (or strikingly hideous!) houses. Even if you have no plans of living in a non-apartment anytime soon, it’s an excellent companion to strolls through historic districts (or impressing your sofamates with surprise architectural factoids in between yelling obscenities at whatever happens to be on the Home & Garden channel. Whichever).

Sample Good Bit: ALL OF THE PHOTOS, honestly, but also the straightforward drawings, like this one.

6. Full Circle by Michael Palin

We didn’t have cable growing up, so my nocturnal television proclivities were spent with CBC and PBS, both of which broadcast a smattering of irregularly scheduled BBC programs (I suppose that’s how I learned about Monty Python?), the most memorable being Michael Palin’s travelogues. The show “Full Circle” followed Palin’s circular journey around 18 countries of the Pacific Rim. Two things I remember most about it: The Englishman’s benevolent curiosity and willingness to contend with the unfamiliar, and that they were aired completely out of order. Already a published diarist, this book is Palin’s personal journal of his travels. It was published to accompany the program, but it’s a fine read on its own — its author always charming and affable when confronted with setbacks, able to peek into a wide variety of lives without disturbing them. It’s the perfect counterpoint to “An Idiot Abroad.”

Sample Good Bit: “Only five days ago I was filming in a cupboard in Buckinghamshire with John Cleese and a tarantula spider and now here I am, just short of the Arctic Circle on a Monday morning, looking across at a Russian rock where it is Tuesday morning — the explanation for this twenty-four-hour time difference being the invisible presence of the International Date Line which slices through the Bering Strait not much more than a stone’s throw away. The Russian soldiers staring out at me from across the water have already had the day I’m having.”

7. Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms by Eugenia Bone

If you have a sort of fearful, phobic curiosity about a subject, the best thing to do, in my opinion, is to find a good book on the subject and dive right in. This is what Mycophilia does for mushrooms, the strange little fungus footstools that can grow almost anywhere — and completely gross me out whenever I come across them. Yet Bone’s incredible enthusiasm and endless drive to encounter and map all corners of the titular ‘weird world’ is the best possible antidote to my squeamishness. It helps, of course, that she is brilliant and hilarious, too.

Sample Good Bit: “That’s why I signed up for the SOMA Wild Mushroom Camp in Occidental, California. SOMA camp usually takes place over a weekend in mid-January. I’d paid $300 and checked off my packing list, which included a sleeping bag, compass, and “favorite whistle,” among many other items not usually owned by people who live in New York apartments, then flown across the country to spend 3 days with 160 fungal-minded people. The SOMA camp (SOMA is an acronym — and a double entendre — for Sonoma Mycological Association and the holy drink of the Indian sacred text, the Rig Veda) had occupied a Christian summer camp that squatted amid young redwoods and rocky outcroppings; the cabins, shower houses, and dining/meeting hall all transformed from one obsession to another. Everything at SOMA camp was mushroomy: the names of the cabins (my travel companion and fellow New York Mycological Association member Arlene Jacobs and I were, coincidentally, assigned to the Lactarius cabin), the mushroom-shaped nametags, the mushroom paraphernalia for sale in the public space. It was like a Trekkie convention for mushroomers.”

8. American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields by Rowan Jacobsen

But maybe you would like to read something shorter? WELL THEN, DO I HAVE THE THING FOR YOU. Oh, do I ever. American Terroir examines twelve foods from around the continent by looking at the location where each tastes best — salmon from the Yukon River, mussels in Nova Scotia, chocolate in Mexico, and so on. His goal is to discover what is so special about the terroir (“taste of the earth”) in those regions that make them particularly ideal for the food. Each section is perfectly commute-sized, a brief but profound chunk of regional gastronomy and, of course, geography.

Sample Good Bit: “There are fruits that act like vegetables (the tomato), there are vegetables that act like fruits (rhubarb), and then there are fruits that act like space aliens. There you have the avocado. Cut in half, it could be a flying visitor from The Jetsons. This little oddball is perhaps the only fruit that has no sugar, and it doesn’t even have the refreshing acidity so important to the appeal of citrus, apples, grapes, and most other fruits. What it does have, in abundance, is fat. Loads of heart-healthy, monounsaturated fat., which is what’s responsible for the avocado’s famously rich and creamy taste. A fully ripened avocado can have an off-the-charts oil content of 30 percent. But it can achieve such heights only in its native land. Avocados are not actually from another planet. They are from Mexico.”

Previously: The Maps We Wandered Into As Kids and Pictures Of You From Space

Victoria Johnson, cartographer, owes the Arlington public library system $9 in overdue fines. She apologizes for offending any birdwatchers or woodwatchers.

The Morning News annual Tournament of Books is off and running today.