IT WAS A reasonable death. He was 90 and took the inevitable final turn in late March. "I think this is it," my brother said from the nursing home. "They brought in the snack cart."
I went to Baltimore and fished a ginger ale out of a bowl of melting ice and sat by the bed. My father, dying, came in and out of stillness. He couldn't hear well, so my brother and I yelled a stream of non sequiturs: "Remember when you ran that marathon?" "Ivy is doing a ballet recital!" "We love you!" I reminded him that he had wanted me to put all his writing online. "I'm going to do that!" I said. He looked straight at me-a last moment of connection-and brightly lit up. "That's great!" he said. (Or something along those lines. His teeth were in the bathroom.)
Dad wrote opaque, elliptical, experimental works of enormous profanity. One of his plays was produced with fanfare in the 1970s, and many poems were published here and there, but most of the manuscripts were returned with polite rejections. He came of age, though, in an era of great writers writing greatly. You stuck to your guns and waited for people to figure you out, and if they didn't, even after decades-their effing loss, buddy. The upshot was 70 years of writing on crumbling yellow onionskin, dotmatrix prints with the tractor feeds still attached, and bright white laser output, along with more than 10,000 ancient WordPerfect files and blog entries, including many repeats. Now all mine to archive.
I thought, briefly, about just not doing it. What could he say? What could anyone say? It wasn't as though the internet was clamoring for the papers of a little-known English professor who retired in the mid-1980s. But a friend who's a classics scholar told me that this is exactly the stuff people should be digitizing. Vellums and parchments will survive another 1,000 years. We should save the ephemeral before it is lost. What was more ephemeral than this? Plus: A promise is a promise.
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Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
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Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
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I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
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AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
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COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.