In this remarkable feat of bravery against the odds, a daredevil attempts the greatest challenge of all: He struggles to wend his way through an obstacle course of tragedy, sorrow and regret, with each choice he makes culminating in a banquet of recrimination and providing a future consisting mainly of even more unpleasant options from which to select, knowing the whole time that the only end result is his own demise, adding even more sadness to the lives of those he loves and upon whom he has already piled unimaginable anguish, all the while under the impression that his intentions were good. Oh, wait, this is a dude skydiving between mountains? I guess that’s cool too.

“Apple’s new iOS 7 software is apparently making some people seasick on solid ground. Experts on motion sickness say the sharpness of the screen and the motion of the icons may be partly to blame. Users who have upgraded to iOS 7 are reporting nausea, headaches and vertigo in a message thread that started Sept. 18 on Apple’s support website.”

by Awl Sponsors

Imagine that your best friend has blood cancer. Out there somewhere you know there’s a good shot at a cure — a matching bone marrow donor. You just have to find the right person.

What if you knew a pair of persistent misconceptions are making the hunt for your friend’s matching donor a lot harder?

A lot of people think that donating bone marrow is a long and painful process. Many people also worry they’ll get stuck with a lot of medical bills if they get called to donate marrow.

Those fears keep a lot of people from joining the Be The Match Registry of willing marrow donors. That’s a shame because everyone who joins the registry is a potential cure for someone with life-threatening blood cancer, like leukemia or lymphoma.

But neither fear is warranted. The fact is that in most cases, donors can give the peripheral blood stem cells needed for a marrow transplant through a non-surgical process in which blood is drawn from one arm, passed through a machine and returned through the other arm.

Even in cases where actual bone marrow is needed, the donation happens under anesthesia during an outpatient procedure.

And the donor incurs no costs. Medical and travel expenses are picked up by either the donor’s insurance or Be The Match, the nonprofit organization that runs a national registry of potential bone marrow donors.

Right now, there are thousands of people who are looking for a matching donor. Don’t let bad information keep you from joining the Be The Match Registry. Joining takes just a few minutes and a simple cheek swab.

And if you’re called to donate, you’ll get the chance to step up and help save a life.

Learn more about joining the Be The Match Registry today.

• Indiebound • McNally Jackson • Amazon • Powell’s • Penguin

We’ve all thought: hey, there oughta be a German word for that. (Have we ever.) Now here comes Schottenfreude, from our Internet pal Ben Schott — it’s coming down the pike in a month. You can get it from your book vendor of choice.

And mark your calendars for what will surely be a very serious lecture at Cooper Union on November 1.

“In some important ways, New York City’s cockroaches are eerily similar to its human inhabitants. New research shows the insects tend to stay in the neighborhoods they grew up in and segregate themselves, much like the city’s ethnic groups and income classes. And as in many a New York immigrant tale, cockroaches’ ancestors likely came to America as stowaways…. A cockroach found on the Upper East Side is genetically different than the Upper West Side and Roosevelt Island cockroaches, Dr. Stoeckle and his team have found.”
 — Also the tiny cockroach who was Cockroach Mayor for the last 12 years vastly increased inequality for cockroaches across New York City.

So long! It was fun to be governed. Kind of. Well not really.

★★ The ceiling of early clouds looked solid, but downriver in New Jersey there were sunlit buildings. For a few hours, autumn’s progress was diverted into a humid spring morning, too damp to bundle up against without sweating. The clouds thinned to blue in spots in the west, then cleared out past the zenith, leaving only the east blurred and gray. But the afternoon was cloudy again, and colder. Uptown, light hit the subway entrance, but failed to achieve any greater purpose. The sky was noise: open blue patches, ugly yellow gray over Midtown. It took the sun’s descent to clear up the dissonance, resolving everything overhead into trusty symphonic harmony, purple, gold, and pink.

“The Vatican cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi told press in Italy Wednesday that, essentially, Jesus was the ‘world’s first tweeter,’ according to The Telegraph. No, history’s most famous carpenter didn’t have a BlackBerry or a Twitter avatar over 2000 years ago. What Ravasi meant was that Jesus’s messages were short, but often powerful, much like the way many people communicate on Twitter today. ‘[Christ] used tweets before everyone else, with elementary phrases made up of fewer than 45 characters like “Love one another,” said Ravasi.’
 — Let’s just assume this is one of those things that actually make sense in the original Italian, like “gays don’t eat pasta,” because otherwise, I don’t know what to do with this week. I have HAD IT.

“Dolphins May be Dumber Than We Think”