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Friday, February 15, 2019

The Enthusiast: In Praise Of Maurice Sendak, by Maria Russo, New York Times

A private boat, appearing just when you feel unjustly confined, outrageously misunderstood …. The serene grin Sendak put on the boy’s face as he sits in that private boat is, to me, what contentment looks like. The ocean has deepening shades of blue and little whitecaps suggesting the ideal, exhilarating amount of wind. A single tree leans into the left side of the frame — this bit of sea is not too far from land, from home. Like Max, I occasionally wished as a child to escape from my family, and truth be told the urge still pops up. But Max sitting happily in his private boat, land in sight, reminds me that my true desire has always been to be close to the people I love, yet find respite from their demands and intrusions.

The Story Behind The Shortest Movie Review Of All Time, by Jeffrey Bloomer, Slate

“This was in the early days of the guide, when we were, in one fell swoop, practicing reviews of hundreds, indeed, thousands of movies,” he added. “We were trying to find interesting, colorful, precise ways to describe a lot of formulaic movies, and there was an existing book before mine, and we were keenly aware of not even accidentally copying the way they had described those movies. If the plot of the ’40s murder mystery was ‘Man strangles his wife and tries to get away with it,’ how many ways can you say that? And our reviews were much, much shorter in the early guides. Much, much shorter.”

The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes, by Charlie Jane Anders, The Atlantic

Astronomers believe that most of the planets in our galaxy that have Earth-like temperatures are likely to be tidally locked. Because their orbital period is the same as their period of rotation, these planets will always present the same face to their sun—just as we always see the same side of the moon, as it orbits Earth.

And the reason for this glut of tidally locked worlds is pretty simple. Up to three-quarters of suns in our galaxy are red dwarfs, or “M-dwarfs,” smaller and cooler than our sun. Any planet orbiting one of these M-dwarfs would need to be much closer to its star to support human life—as close as Mercury is to our sun. And at that distance, the star’s gravity would pull it into a tidally locked orbit.

How So-Called ‘Ugly Food’ Is Challenging Notions Of What We Crave, by Ligaya Mishan, New York Times

Such is the surreal glory of stargazy pie — also known as starry-gazy-pie — so called because the fish’s eyes appear to be “studying the stars,” according to the English antiquarian James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1846). Originally an English recipe from the cobblestone coastal village of Mousehole, Cornwall, the dish is believed to date to a season of famine in the 16th century, when (the story goes) one gutsy fisherman took to the stormy seas and hauled in enough marine life to feed the town. Its residents were so hungry that the bounty was baked all at once, in a single pie. Every year, on Dec. 23, locals celebrate the survival of their ancestors with a festival dedicated to the dish.

Beyond Cornwall, stargazy pie is largely unknown, even to many Brits. In China, however, this obscure regional specialty has become a subject of fascination, an exemplar of all that the Chinese find baffling about Western cooking. In 2012, an account on Douban — a social network focused on lifestyle and culture and whose reach as of September exceeds 300 million active monthly users — started sharing photographs from the British supper-club chef Kerstin Rodgers’s blog, including her version of stargazy pie. Commenters found the dish bizarre and suggested that the fish’s dignity had been compromised, although whether this was intended as criticism or comedy isn’t entirely clear. (Fish heads are featured without controversy in Chinese cooking, so perhaps the outrage was the dough.)

An Improbably Compelling Novel Of The EU, by The Economist

From such material he created what might seem impossible: a readable novel of Brussels. “The Capital” is a mischievous yet profound story about storytelling; about the art of shaping a narrative by finding resonances in the messy stuff of life.

This Gorgeous Book On NASA’s Glory Days Will Inspire The Astronaut In All Of Us, by Drew Tewksbury, Los Angeles Times

From NASA’s early days slinging monkeys through the stratosphere to the Mars rover’s recent red planet selfie, the book catalogs with beautiful detail the rapid pace of scientific and engineering advances during the 20th-century space race. “It’s hard to imagine that a period shorter than a single human lifespan bridges the gulf between the first powered airplane, hand-built out of wood and fabric by a pair of Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop owners, and the first Moon-bound spaceships, jointly constructed by some 400,000 people working across an entire nation,” writes essayist Roger D. Launius.

The Politics Of Feeling, by Nick Laird, Granta

I’m going to level with you now about the despicable phoniness of those
who declare they’re going to level with you now: also, let me make it
abundantly clear that those who say let me make it abundantly clear