Writing I admire

27.   Winners of the 2023 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest , photos compiled by Alan Taylor for The Atlantic, January 22, 2024.  Spectacular beyond words and a reminder that we remain ignorant of other beautiful life at our peril. 

 26.   A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows:  How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith, by Maria Popova and published in The Marginalian on January 4, 2024. Charming article with Old English bird history (with a surprise that includes the Gutenberg Press) and also offering charming and delightful examples of Brian Wildsmith's illustrations from his 1967 book Birds . A stare of owls is just one example of Brian Wildsmith's art that sent me on a search for his Birds book.   I searched Amazon for Birds by Brian Wildsmith.  Amazon's site is a little ambiguous, but seems the book is unavailable.  From there I learned that the book was from January, 1981 and published by Oxford University Press.  Even though the OUP website has an Education and Chidren's book link, it did not have the author's original Birds book.  Sadly, likely out of print.  It did, however, have a nice little bib on...

25 .   If There Are No Stupid Questions, Then How Do You Explain Quora?    The Tragedy of the Q&A site is the story of the internet.  From The Atlantic, by Jacob Stern. This essay landed in my email as part of The Atlantic's weekly round-up.  Just reading the title was a confirming experience for me and in his essay Jacob Stern hits the nail on the head.  It's not that the writing is necessarily that great or writing I admire.  Doesn't need to be for this topic; just needs to be clear, concise and honest.  From my experience with Quora , Stern's essay is all three. Like the author I, too, found myself receiving Quora Q&A s in my email.  At first the Q&As I received were about India, Indians and also Scandinavia, especially Norway and Norwegians.  I had no idea why.  A few months prior to being inundated with the Quora emails, I had returned from a trip to India.  Coincidence?  I had also watched the Netflix f...

24.  From The New York Times Magazine, The Great Read, today, January 14, 2024 a story about a beluga whale. The Whale Who Went AWOL .  Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity.  Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.  By Ferris Jabr.  A paragraph from the article:   "Wherever Hvaldimir goes , he is followed by a small but passionate entourage of human defenders and devotees. One individual among them has become especially prominent and controversial: Regina Crosby Haug, an American filmmaker whose entanglement with Hvaldimir is largely a product of circumstance." It should be noted that Regina Crosby Haug refuted several of the claims and accusations the author, Ferris Jabr, made in this piece.  She responded to many of the critical readers' comments (my own included; which was later retracted by the NYT for reasons I didn't understand) with her own explanations for where and how Jabr got his facts wrong.   As a reader ...

23.   ... and What Came Next by David French, op-ed writer for the New York Times and published in the NYT today, 01/08/2024.  Op-eds are not necessarily admirable writing, but they often express current and important issues.  Often I think that the op-eds receiving the most attention are politically focused.  However, the best are often deeply personal.  For this reason, and many others too I guess, they are one of our most important channels for discourse.  The things that David French writes about here were important for me to read.